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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH 



iSg i\}e mmz lutijor. 



THE CHURCH IDEA. An Essay 
towards Unity. 

CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

_[Out of print. ^ 

THE CAUSES OF THE SOUL. 

A Book of Sermons. 



©{je 33cil}len iLectures for 1891 



THE 



PEACE OF THE CHURCH 



BY 
WILLIAM REED HUNTINGTON 

RECTOR OF GRACE CHURCH NEW YORK 



In Veritate Victoria 




CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1891 







Copyright, 1891, by 
William Reed Huntington. 



All rights reserved. 



LC control Number 




tmp96 



028759 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



TO 

THE DEAR MEMORY OF 

H. H. 

WHO ALIKE BY PRECEPT AND BY EXAMPLE 
TAUGHT ME HOPE. 



THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 



John Bohlen, who died in this city on the twenty sixth day of 
April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of One Hundred Thousand 
Dollars, to be distributed to religious and charitable objects in accord- 
ance with the well-known wishes of the testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trustees, under the 
will of Mr. BoHLEx, transferred and paid over to " The Rector, 
Church Wardens, and Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, 
Philadelphia," in trust, a sum of money for certain designated pur- 
poses, out of which fund the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was set 
apart for the endowment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, upon 
the following terms and conditions • — 

"The money shall be invested in good, substantial, and safe securities, and 
held in trust for a fund to be called The John Bohlen liectureship; and the 
income shall be applied annually to the payment of a qualified person, whether 
clergyman or layman, for the delivery and publication of at least one hundred 
copies of two or more lecture sermons. These lectures shall be delivered at 
such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the persons nominated to 
appoint the lecturer shall from time to time determine, giving at least six 
months' notice to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same may 
conveniently be done, and in no case selecting the same person as lecturer a 
second time within a period of five years. The payment shall be made to said 
lecturer, after the lectures have been printed, and received by the trustees, of all 
the income for the year derived from said fund, after defraying the expense 
of printing the lectures, and the other incidental expenses attending the same. 

" The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the terms set forth in 
the will of the Kev. John Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the 
'Bampton Lectures,' at Oxford, or any other subject distinctively connected 
with or relating to the Christian religion. 

" The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of May, or as soon 
thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the persons who for the time being 
shall hold the offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Dio- 
cese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity; the Rector of said Church; 
the Professor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and 
the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. 

" In case either of said offices ai'e vacant, the others may nominate the 
lecturer " 

Under this trust the Reverend William R. Huntington, D.D., 
D.C.L., Rector of Grace Church, New York, was appointed to 
deliver the lectures for the Year 1891. 

Philadelphia, Easter, 1891. 



THE WANT OF A PEOPLE S CHURCH IS A WANT THAT 
CANNOT BE SUPPLIED BY ANYTHING ELSE. 

VON BOLLINGER. 



PREFACE. 



A NATURAL comment upon the general drift of 
argument and appeal in the following pages would 
be that it is too conspicuously Protestant. Are the 
children of the Reformation, the author might very 
plausibly be asked, the only Christian folk to be 
counted in forecasting the contour and proportions 
of our national Church? Is no significance to be 
attached to the marvellous growth and spread among 
us of the Latin form of Christ's religion in these 
recent days ? And have we no word of invitation 
for those who differ with us in their estimate of the 
value of the results Luther and Cranmer brought to 
pass ? Certainly there is force in these expostula- 
tions. To wink the advance of Roman Catholic re- 
hgion in this country out of sight is as foolish as 
the letting ourselves be irritated by what we see is 
weak. 

Neither are those to Ije commended who can see 
in the activity of the Papal forces nothing less 
or other than a distinct menace to our civilization. 
The real reason why the conciliatory effort of this 
book bends wholly towards a different point of the 



X PREFACE. 

compass is that, for the present, any attempt from 
without to influence the Roman Catholic Church is 
absohitely hopeless. The Vatican decrees of 1870 
have accomplished what the framers and promoters 
of them doubtless meant that they should accom- 
plish, — the utter overthrow of any hopes of " peace 
with Rome " on ground other than that of uncondi- 
tional surrender. Meanwhile there is much to en- 
courage the belief that, in ways hidden from the eyes 
of outsiders, a change is going on within the confines 
of the Roman Church in this country, likely, at no 
very distant day, to become knowable and readable 
of all men. The German and the Irish elements, 
there is reason to suspect, consort as ill together 
within the one fold as ever did Guelph and Ghibel- 
line of old ; and it would not be the strangest thing 
in all the world, if the indisposition of the faithful 
laity to receive their politics from Rome were to 
expand into a large unwillingness to accept foreign 
dictation in any department of thought and life. 
" Ultramarine " may grow to be as obnoxious an ad- 
jective in America as ever '' ultramontane " was in 
Europe. 

With the upspringing of a genuine and general 
" Old Catholic " movement among the Romanists of 
the United States, many things now seemingly impos- 
sible might become possible, — among them an Eng- 
lished and reformed Missal, a modified Confessional, 
and a rehabilitation of the primitive Creeds as the 
only oecumenical symbols of binding force. When 



PREFACE. XI 

this state of things shall have been reached (and 
events in Europe as well as in America may be 
hastening it more rapidly than we suppose), it will 
be time enough to begin waving our olive branch 
towards the extreme right ; the two religions will 
at least have come within speaking distance of each 
other. 

For the present, the only hopeful outlook for non- 
Roman Christians seeking unity is in the direction 
of the great, restless, ill-compacted and ill-contented 
mass of reformed Christendom. To aid those who, 
deeply dissatisfied with things as they are, are feeling 
about in the dark for pillars strong enough to hold up 
things as they ought to be, has been the author's one 
endeavor. 

The task set before the Christian Church in Amer- 
ica is her familiar one of conquest ; but open-eyed 
observers have to acknowledge that the conditions of 
the warfare are, in many respects, unparalleled. What 
we are witnessing is not the hopeful approach of a 
new religion to minds wholly unfamiliar with its mes- 
sage, but rather the painful endeavor of an old reli- 
gion to maintain its hold upon a mixed multitude, 
already nominally under its sway, but so situated as to 
be peculiarly open to the temptation to revolt. The 
suggestion that possibly America may not continue 
permanently Christian is undoubtedly a painful one 
whether to make or to receive; but honest students 
of the signs of the times cannot, with a clear con- 
science, refuse to take it into account. To a religious 



xii PREFACE. 

mind, that horoscope of our national destinies looks 
to be infinitely the most worthy which sees in the 
land that has been given us an opportunity for the 
upbuilding of the Kingdom of God on earth such as 
never before was put within a people's grasp. No- 
where, it would seem, so easily as here might Chris- 
tian civilization, taught by the blunders of the past 
and unimpeded by the rubbish of old failure, essay 
to build anew the perfect city. The very fairness of 
the vision is to some eyes sufficient evidence that the 
dream is certain to come true. We stumble not at 
believing what with the whole heart we most desire 
to believe, except, indeed, when the obstacles to our 
faith are of the overwhelming sort; and this ideal 
picture of the new Civitas Dei destined to spring up 
on a continent mysteriously kept out of sight until the 
old errors of construction had betrayed themselves 
and all things were ready for a new attempt, has 
a subtile charm in it to which the imagination easily 
succumbs. 

But men engaged in the administration of impor- 
tant trusts are bound to take counsel of their just 
apprehensions as well as of their sanguine hopes ; 
and the Christian Church, as the trustee of the faith, 
may not too confidently assume that all things will 
fall out happily for her, and as they ought to do, in 
this new world. Some fears are reasonable and 
proper fears, and to shut our eyes on them is but 
to invite them to fulfil themselves. 

There are those of us who have become convinced 



PREFACE. xiii 

that only in a genuine, thorough-going, actual and vis- 
ible unity is there hope for the survival of what is best 
in the Christian life of the Republic. But we do not 
desire to compass our end, or rather what we like to 
think of as God's purpose, by any hypocritical veiling 
of real difficulties, or insincere attempts to put obsta- 
cles out of existence by putting them temporarily out 
of mind. " Things are what they are," and no bandy- 
ing of pleasant words or exchange of platform courte- 
sies can alter the everlasting fact that unity, in order 
to endure, must rest on truth. 

W. R. H. 

New York, May 1, 1891. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

A Protocol 3 



11. 

The Archives 51 

III. 

The Credenda 99 

IV. 

The Signs and Seals 139 

V. 

Pilotage 173 

VI. 
A Church by Love Established 209 



THE QUADRILATERAL. 



I. 



The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as 
" containing all things necessary to salvation," and as being 
the rule and ultimate standard of faith. 



TL 

The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol ; and the 
Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian 
faith. 

III. 

The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself, — Bap- 
tism and the Supper of the Lord, — ministered with unfailing 
use of Christ's words of institution, and of the elements 
ordained by Him. 

IV. 

The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods 
of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and 
peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church. 



I. 

A PROTOCOL. 



As the safety of the whole is the intei-est of the whole, and cannot be 
provided for without government, either one or more or many, let us inquire 
whether one good government is not, relative to the object in question, more 
competent than any other given number whatever. — The Federalist. 



THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH 



I. 

A PROTOCOL. 

There was once what was known as " the peace of 
the Empire." There is destined to arrive the peace 
of the Church. The peace of the Empire meant a 
civil tranquillity, brought about and held secure by 
a strong central force posited at Rome. 

From this huge dynamo went out the threads that 
carried light and heat to the farthest extremities of 
the old Mediterranean world. It was a powerful 
plant that could propel energy along such tenuous 
conductors, and to such distances. The strength and 
wit of many generations had gone to the construction 
of the machine ; but once created, it acquired a cer- 
tain momentum of its own, a running force largely 
independent of circumstances. It was not like one 
of those delicate mechanisms which a grain of sand 
or a knot in the thread brings to a stand-still; the 
rollers kept their motion, and the long arms their 
thrust, quite regardless of petty obstructions of what- 
ever sort. The Caesars were merely men intrusted 



4 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

with the running of the dynamo ; oftener than not, 
they were themselves crushed among the wheels. So 
impressive was this self-perpetuating aspect of the 
Empire that men came to look at the vast organism 
as immortal, a thing that could not die ; and secular 
poets, eager to welcome back the Golden Age, could 
picture to themselves no better fulfilment of their 
hopes than such a stretching of the peace of the 
Empire as would make it cover the whole earth. A 
world 

" lapt in universal law," — 

and that law Roman law, — was the goal of their 
most sanguine dreams. 

The Christian mind of to-day sees in all this a 
divinely ordered preparation for the spread of the 
gospel. The peace of the Empire made the spiritual 
conquest of the Empire possible. The military roads 
were as available for the evangelist as for the legion- 
ary, and the imperial posts could carry epistles as 
easily as rescripts. 

Hence it is no wonder that when the time was 
fulfilled for the so-called conversion of the Empire, 
the notion should have taken possession of the minds 
of many that the City of God was already come. But 
really, in point of fact, the Empire never was con- 
verted. Doubtless manners were softened, jurispru- 
dence modified, the general look of things a good deal 
altered for the better ; but the Empire, as such, ex- 
perienced no change of heart. It continued what it 



A PROTOCOL. O 

had always been, — a wonderfully weli-contrived admin- 
istrative framework, penetrated and backed by phy- 
sical force. The painting of a new monogram on the 
plate of the machine may have served in some meas- 
ure to discredit Caesar ; it implied no real enthrone- 
ment of Christ. 

But just because the Empire was ineligible for 
conversion, it became liable to fall, — and fell. 

To the bulk of its immemorial possessions, — some 
of them precious, a good many of them embarrassing, 
a few deadly, — the Roman Church fell heir ; and nota- 
bly to the old tradition that associated efficiency with 
centralization. We have come, in modern times, to 
know more about the structure of the human body 
than the ancients did, and we have learned from that 
best of all object-lessons to anticipate in a perfect 
organism the distribution of centres of force. 

To the Roman mind such a thought as this was 
wholly foreign. Unless the law went forth from 
Rome, how could there be unity ? As this question 
had seemed to the emperors to admit of but one reply ; 
so it came to seem also to the popes. Hence when 
the consciousness of nationality awoke strongly in 
the northern races, the clash followed that passes in 
history under the name of the Reformation. 

I am not attempting a complete statement of the 
causes of that momentous quarrel. Besides its po- 
litical character, the movement had also its still 
more serious doctrinal aspects. The indictment 
found against the Latins included the charge of a 



6 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

superstitious adulteration of the ancient faith with 
Pagan ingredients, as well as that of an infringement 
of the ancient liberties. Were I inviting you to a 
thorough analysis of the Roman Catholic controversy, 
all this would have to be taken into account; but 
for our immediate purpose, the effect of the Reforma- 
tion upon polity is more important than its effect 
upon dogma. 

We are working our way towards an understanding 
of the ecclesiastical state of things that confronts us 
in America ; and it is essential to a just appreciation 
of facts as they are that we should remind ourselves 
of facts as they were. There was a time then, and 
that not so very long ago, when there had succeeded 
to the peace of the Empire 'something that was sup- 
posed to be, in an equally real sense, the peace of the 
Church. To be sure it was ruffled by disturbances 
and heart-burnings not a few ; but so, for that matter, 
had the peace of the Empire been, even at its best 
estate. Nevertheless, the great fact stared men in 
the face that there existed a region, bounded by geo- 
graphical lines more or less definite, known under the 
comprehensive name of Christendom. 

Throughout this tract of country certain great re- 
ligious institutes found unvarying recognition and 
acceptance. 

One could go from land to land and find every- 
where the same priesthood, the same sacraments, the 
same pious usages, with which he had been familiar 
in his own home from childhood. I am not now 



A PROTOCOL. 7 

speaking of the blemishes and drawbacks that at- 
tached to this order of things ; I am calling attention 
to what was attractive, and, upon the surface at least, 
admirable in it all. Certainly a traveller would not 
find such pri^dlege of sanctuary amiss to-day if he 
could share it. It would add to the enjoyment of 
a journey in Spain, for instance, if in a homesick 
moment one could cross the threshold of Cordova's 
great church, or kneel down on the floor of some 
lesser house of God by the roadside, and feel that he 
did so by as good a right and with as sincere a wel- 
come as if he were native to the soil. 

How can we wonder, then, that devout minds of 
a conservative cast, and keenly alive to the excellen- 
cies of the then existing system, should have felt 
disposed to fight to the death a movement which by 
implication threatened, even if it did not avowedly 
assail, the integrity of this same Christendom ? And 
how can we wonder that in our own days ardent and 
imaginative souls, viewing the past in the warm golden 
light that smooths rough outlines and makes the hard 
exterior of distant objects beautiful, should have felt 
disposed to insist that only by retracing their steps 
and going back to the Catholic beliefs and usages of 
the old days before the quarrel, could Christendom 
be re-achieved? 

But before we take up with that timid philosophy 
of history which can see in the Reformation nothing 
better than a blunder, we must consider whether any 
such return to cover as the one proposed is practicable. 



8 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

It is one thing to maintain an existing system against 
innovation, it is another and much harder task to re- 
establish a system that has suffered fracture. The 
genie of the Arabian story was with difficulty coaxed 
back into the casket that had been his prison. The 
spirit set free at the Reformation is not incapable of 
being housed, but it will never consent to return 
to quarters no roomier than those from which it 
broke away. Least of all can the proposal to rehabil- 
itate the Christendom that was before Luther and 
Cranmer, make a plausible showing in America. In 
countries that once formed a part of the Roman sys- 
tem, even though they lay upon the outer edge of it, 
a plea for reconstruction upon the old lines can boast 
a certain modicum of weight. When the leaders of 
the Anglo-Catholic movement, for example, began 
some fifty years ago to dream of carrying England 
back into " the Latin obedience," the forlornness of 
their hope was not at first apparent. Ail the forces 
of romanticism were on their side ; they knew that 
they could count upon considerable dissatisfaction, 
born of despondency, in the liberal ranks, and there 
was a rallying centre ready to their hands in the old 
families among the nobility that through all fortunes 
had remained loyal to the ancient order. England 
had once held a place in the Roman framework ; why 
might she not again ? 

Far less excuse have they who, here in America, 
turn for reconstructive help to Italy. Notions that 
were tenable in the days when the earth was supposed 



A PROTOCOL. 9 

to be the centre of the universe, ceased to be tenable 
after the heliocentric astronomy had come in, and 
notions that were tenable under the heliocentric hy- 
pothesis as first understood, have ceased to be ten- 
able now that we suspect that even the sun itself has 
motion and an orbit. No more can an ecclesiastical 
polity, originally fashioned to fit the Roman Empire 
as closely as a cloud-bank moulds itself to the land- 
scape on which it lies, answer for the needs of a world 
dimensioned out of all proportion to the Christendom 
that used to be. 

This does not necessarily mean that the Americas 
and Australia must needs construct for themselves 
forms of Church life and governance that shall stand 
wholly unrelated to what has gone before. That is 
not God's way of working, nor the way of wise men 
who seek to imitate the Maker's methods. The Co- 
pernican astronomy, to go back to our parable, did 
indeed displace, but it by no means wholly discredited 
the Ptolemaic astronomy. All that was true in the 
old system passed over into the new. The ancient 
observations had not lost their value because a revised 
grammar of their significance had come in. 

There are structural principles the knowledge of 
which is as old as human society itself, and which no 
revolutions can supersede. In any future unification 
of the Christian body these principles will have recog- 
nition and play. They cannot be disowned, because 
they are written on the nature of man, and rank among 
the primal facts. To disentangle from whatever ought 



10 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

to be reckoned transitory, secondary, and adventitious, 
these first principles of social house-building will be 
my main endeavor in these lectures. It is always by 
returning to the true principia, and never by a mere 
going back to old times, that society, whether in its 
civil or its ecclesiastical form, finds safety. 

It will be well to begin by considering the magni- 
tude and complexity of the problem that offers itself 
for solution here in the United States, — a country 
which is at once the hope and the despair of believers in 
the reunion of Christendom ; their despair, because no- 
where else has the process of division and subdivision 
been further carried ; their hope, because nowhere is 
there less of outward constraint to hinder a complete 
reconciliation, if only the true basis of amity can be 
found. 

T invite you then to a quick review of our ecclesias- 
tical past. 

With the adoption of the Constitution, the United 
States became a nation, and by a stroke of the pen 
embarrassments innumerable that had vexed the life 
of the ill-compacted Confederation were put away. 
No such summary process of reconstruction and con- 
solidation was possible for the scattered religious so- 
cieties which from time to time during the colonial 
period had been planted along the Atlantic seaboard, 
and now found themselves, each with its own little 
stock of inherited prejudices and convictions, maxims 
of polity and formulas of faith, about starting on a 
new career. The time had been in the Old World 



A PROTOCOL. 11 

when the successful assertion bv a people of its 
proper civil unity would have been followed, as a 
matter of course, by the establishment of a corres- 
ponding unity ecclesiastical. The question with the 
England of the seventeenth century had not been 
whether there should or should not be an established 
religion, but whether the religion to be estabhshed 
should be Anglican, Presbyterian, or Papal. Such 
was not the case with the newly liberated colonies 
in the closing years of tlie century that followed the 
seventeenth. The day for acts of uniformity had 
manifestly gone by ; and although to religious minds 
deeply impressed with the evils of sectarian strife 
there must have come a mingled sense of envy and 
self-reproach in noting the comparative ease with 
which the State had accomplished oneness, all sensi- 
ble people settled down to the conclusion that so far 
as the Church was concerned the case was one in 
which patience must be allowed to have her perfect 
work. If it was a scandal, and a scandal it doubtless 
was, to see religion arrayed in a coat of many colors, 
rather than in her own proper seamless robe, there 
was at least the comfort of remembering that foreign 
weavers and old-time looms were responsible for the 
garment's tints and texture. It is true that the deter- 
mination utterly to free religion from State control 
has the look of having been an after-thought with the 
framers of the Constitution, appearing, as it does, in 
the form of an amendment to that instrument, and 
not as one of the original ai'ticlcs. The fact, how- 



12 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ever, that the amendment, when proposed, excited no 
active opposition, and was promptly ratified, shows 
how wide-spread and deep-rooted in the mind of the 
nascent republic was the conviction that Congress 
ought to " make no law respecting an establishment 
of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." 
That this view of the situation was shared by leading 
minds among the Anglican portion of the community 
is evidenced by the way in which the framers of the 
American Prayer-book expressed themselves. There 
were then present on our soil some ten or twelve forms 
of organized Christianity, of which the Anglican was 
one. In the face of this fact, what attitude did the 
Church-of-England men think it becoming in them to 
assume ? Did they assert an ecclesiastical monopoly ? 
Did they put forward any imperious claim to suprem- 
acy, or even to primacy ? Not at all ; they simply, in 
all humility of mind, remarked that, as a result of the 
political revolution that had taken place, " the different 
religious denominations of Christians " in what had 
been the Colonies, but had now become the States, 
had been " left at full and equal liberty to model and 
organize their respective churches and forms of wor- 
ship and discipline in such manner as they might 
judge most convenient for their future prosperity, 
consistently with the constitution and laws of their 
country." ^ 

This paragraph has been criticised for its naivete, 
and for a lack of that proper self-assertion which 
^ See Preface to the American Book of Common Prayer. 



A PROTOCOL. 13 

Anglicans alive to their hereditary rights and privi- 
leges should have maintained. It was. however, the 
language of men who, before all else, were bent on 
looking the actual facts of their position in the face, 
undisturbed by any a 'priori theories of ecclesiastical 
"mission and jurisdiction." 

They may have entertained individually the very 
strongest convictions as to the exclusive rightfulness 
of the Episcopal regimen ; they may have held te- 
naciously in their own minds to the apostolicity of 
liturgical worship; but they had the good judgment 
to perceive that to ask from their fellow-citizens any- 
thing more than a fair field and no favor would be 
folly. To have planted the Anglican standard in the 
spirit in which the last of the Bourbons hoisted at 
Frohsdorf the white flag of his house, crying to 
Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Republicans alike, " This 
or nothing," might have gained them the sort of 
admiration we accord the captain of a sinking ship 
who refuses to quit his quarter-deck, but it would 
have cost us, the children, our inheritance. White 
and his compeers chose a wiser course. Persuaded of 
the innate vitality of their principles, they cheerfully 
refrained from anything that might look like an arro- 
gant assertion of them, well content to abide the 
working of that law of survival which, though un- 
formulated in their day, was, in its practical bearing 
upon the affairs of human life, as clearly discernible 
then as now. 

But what, in point of historical fact, were the 



14 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

" different religious denominations," referred to in 
the preface of the Prayer-book ? Roughly classified, 
and named in the order of their earliest organized 
beginnings they were these : Episcopalians (1607), 
Congregationalists (1620), Reformed Dutch (1628), 
Roman Catholics (1631), Baptists (1639), Lutherans 
(1669), Friends (1672), Presbyterians (1684), Men- 
nonites (1708), Moravians (1734), Methodists (1773).i 
This list might be lengthened by expanding genera 
into species^ — particularly in the case of the Baptists 
and of the Presbyterians, of which there were even 
then several varieties; but for the purposes of a general 
view the enumeration as it stands is adequate. 

Ethnologically considered, the bulk of the people 
were of English stock ; but the Dutch, German, and 
Scandinavian elements were not inconsiderable, and 
there was also a certain small though very precious 
infusion of French Huguenot blood. It is evident 
that this is a strong Protestant showing. With the 
single exception of Maryland, itself largely Angli- 
can, the newly enfranchised States may be said to 
have stood for the Reformation. It looked as if the 
two religions had divided the two Americas between 
them, Protestant Europe having said, I will take the 
North ; and Papal Europe, I will take the South. It 
should be acknowledged, however, that with respect 
to that one of the two continents with which we are 
the more directly interested, this remark calls for 
qualification. French Roman Catholics flanked the 

1 Dorchester's Christianity in the United States, pp. 35-43. 



A PROTOCOL 15 

infant republic on the northeast, and Spanish Roman 
Catholics on the south, and both of these ante- 
dated, the one by nearly a century, and the other 
by some years, the Protestant occupancy of North 
America. 

Such, then, was the ecclesiastical state of things at 
the time when this country first came forward to take 
her place in the family of nations. We set out upon 
our career pledged in the temporal order to unity, 
but given over in the spiritual order to what might be 
called, by a seeming solecism, classified confusion. 
In a few of the States the sanction by government 
of some one denomination to the discredit of the 
others survived the shock of the Revolution ; but it 
was only for a little. The doctrine of establish- 
ments had received its death-blow ; and in a few 
years all semblance of a desire on the part of the civil 
authorities to control the religious affiliations of the 
citizen vanished. Church and State became almost 
as distinctly separated as they had been before Con- 
stantine's day. I say " almost," because absolutely 
separate Church and State never can become in any 
country where the bulk of the people hold the Chris- 
tian faith. Wherever property interests and questions 
of contract come in, there the State has a hold. 
Public worship calls for a roof and walls ; and where 
these are there is property, with all its liabilities to 
taxation, attachment, mortgage, confiscation and the 
like. The fact that a house has been consecrated to 
religious uses does not take it out of that area of 



16 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

things material in which the State enjo}s eminent 
domain. Then there is marriage, a contract or a 
sacrament according as we look at it from a common- 
law or a canon-law standpoint. As an agreement 
between two individuals, it is a matter for judges 
and juries to pronounce upon; as a "holy estate" 
it is the Church's affair, one of the sanctities with 
which no extraneous power may intermeddle. With 
limitations the same thing holds good of education 
and of the administration of charity. These are 
matters which the State may almost be said to have 
taken up at the suggestion, or, at any rate, influenced 
by the example of the Church. To j)ut it in graphic 
form, the one circle overlaps the other, and certain 
interests are found resident in the space which belongs 
exclusively to neither of them, while yet geometrically 
a segment of each. 

While, therefore, if we mean to be accurate, it is 
necessary to remember that with the Christianized 
peoples things secular can never be wholly severed 
from things sacred, we have, speaking broadly, a 
perfect right to say that the Revolution broke up 
completely the old-time alliance between Church and 
State, leaving the former of the two at perfect liberty 
to build itself up as best it might. 

Why is it then, that the Church has lagged so far 
behind the State in the matter of achieving unity ? 
For the simple reason that the State holds and wields 
the power of the sword. The thirteen colonies did 
not become a republic because the people as a whole 



A PROTOCOL. 17 

wanted a republic, for it is notorious that many of 
them were at heart warmly attached to the monarchy. 
The republic was born of the wishes of the most part, 
— a most part so strong that it would have been hope- 
less for the lesser part to attempt resistance. The 
framers of the Declaration of Independence had said 
of governments that they derived " their just powers 
from the consent of the governed." By the " governed " 
they must of course have meant the greater number of 
the governed, for probably no government has ever 
enjoyed the unanimous good-will of those who lived 
under its laws. The State, in matters of the State, 
does not and cannot tolerate organized dissent ; the 
law of self-preservation compels it to insist on unity. 
There may be, and in free countries there is entire 
liberty to think, and a large liberty to speak in this 
way or in that as to the wisdom of existing arrange- 
ments ; but no attempt to act as if these arrangements 
did not exist is tolerated for a moment. A citizen of 
Pennsylvania is free to hold the opinion that the 
Supreme Court of that State is an unjust tribunal, 
and he is also free to exert himself in every way to 
bring about the abolition of it by legislative process ; 
but the moment he makes bold to act in defiance of 
the judgments of that court he finds himself under 
arrest. The Bourbons stamped their cannon with 
the legend Regum ratio ultima. They were not speak- 
ing for monarchy only. All civil government, 
whether it be called democratic or imperial, resorts 
to force as its final argument. When discontent 



IS THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

grows strong enough, and is sufficiently excited to 
strike back, then we have riot, rebellion, or civil war, 
as the case may be ; but ordinarily things go on much 
as they would do if all men agreed. There is acquies- 
cence even when there is not assent ; so evidently true 
is it of a civil community, that in the ordering of its 
affairs it is quite impossible that every man should 
have his own way. That would be a singular com- 
monwealth, indeed, which should allow the impe- 
rialists, the monarchists, the republicans, and the 
socialists within its borders " full and equal liberty 
to model and organize " their respective governments 
" in such manner as they might judge most convenient 
for their future prosperity." What keeps these 
various groups of theorists from attempting of their 
own motion so to embody their ideas, is the fact that 
the government actually in possession is backed by 
force, and will not let them do it. 

But the spiritual society which we know under the 
name of the Church is precluded, by the very law of 
its being, from maintaining unity after this fashion. 
The Church is a "union of hearts." The power of 
the sword is nowhere discoverable in its charter. Its 
only weapon is persuasion, its only fetter the bond of 
charity, its only punishment a withdrawal of sacra- 
mental privilege. We have to acknowledge that often 
and again the Church has lost all this out of mind, and 
acted as if fear rather than love were the real unify- 
ing power ; but in the beginning it was not so. Christ 
instanced the fact that his disciples were not fighting 



A PROTOCOL. 19 

men as an evidence of the unworldly character of his 
kingdom. The implication was that in the building 
up of the new social order He had come to announce 
and to begin, no reliance would be placed on force. 
He put his followers upon their honor, and trusted 
them to serve Him without fear. In a common loy- 
alty to Himself they were to find the essential motive 
to unity. The rest would follow in due time. 

In the light of these thoughts the tardy pace at 
which the Church moves here in America toward 
the achievement of her own proper unity is easily 
understood. In the matter of civil organization we 
forced our way ; in the matter of ecclesiastical organ- 
ization we are feeling our way. 

First of all, there has had to be awakened in men's 
minds a proper sense of the discredit that attaches to 
our present broken estate. Since denominationalism 
came in as a recognized state of things, all sorts of 
pleasant parables have been devised to make it appear 
lovely. Even the rainbow has been forced to lend 
its manifold beauty in aid of the exigencies of the 
argument, and we are exhorted to discern in our 
wretched divisions a divinely ordered variety every 
shade of which is essential to the full chromatic 
effect. Since the fathers fell asleep, all things, for 
the denominationalist, continue as they were from 
the beginning. It is his steadfast averment that 
matters are well enough as they are, and that it is 
downright ecclesiastical Quioxtism to attempt to 
better them. 



20 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

Sometimes in defence of his view the denomination- 
ahst presses the argument from design, sometimes 
the argument from despair. The Creator, he reminds 
us, has made men's temperaments as various as their 
faces. If the familiar reminder that two blades of 
grass are never found alike fails to convince us, we 
are further referred to Charles the Fifth and the 
story of the monastery clocks. Surely by such wealth 
of illustration we ought to be persuaded that the 
sects into which the Christian Church has let itself 
be splintered are really no accident, but contrari- 
wise the fruit of a beneficent purpose, an intelligent 
and harmonious design. Let us school ourselves to 
see in our denominations only so many flower-beds 
in the great garden God has planted, and in which 
He walks. Here are roses, there carnations, yonder 
lilies of the valley that love the shade ; but it is all 
one garden, planned by one mind, laid out by one 
hand, fed by one sunshine. 

All this has a familiar sound. We have heard it, 
time and again. But often when the difficulty of 
reconciling this pretty parable, or these pretty para- 
bles, with certain very distinct words of Holy Scrip- 
ture, not to mention certain hard facts of human life, 
has been pressed home so vigorously that there is no 
escape, the denominationalist falls back on the argu- 
ment from despair. True, he says, it would indeed 
have been most delightful could the dream of the ear- 
ly Fathers of the Church have been fulfilled ; could 
Cyprian and Augustine have had their way. But it 



A PROTOCOL. 21 

was not to be. The experiment was tried, and tried on 
a large scale, and it failed, and that was the end of it ; 
there is nothing more to be said or to be attempted. 

Thus what the flower-garden was to the argument 
from design, the shattered image becomes to the argu- 
ment from despair. The experiment of unifying the 
Church on the plan and by the method of imperialism 
having come to nought, we must, forsooth, sit down 
with folded hands convinced that because Christen- 
dom is to-day divided, divided it must always be. 
And yet, so flagrant are the practical e^-ils of denom- 
inationalism as a system ; so foolish does the awk- 
ward contrivance look when we attempt to carry it 
to the heathen ; so unsightly in real life is the result 
of taking it for granted that the entreaties, " Be ye 
all of one mind," " Mark them that cause divisions 
among you," " Love as brethren," were never meant 
to be literally understood, that even the apologists of 
things as they are begin to speak in broken tones, 
and to murmur under their breath that there must 
be some more excellent way if only it could be found. 
Not so often as of old is the voice of the orator heard 
on public days exulting over the number of the spires 
in an American village, and drawing from the specta- 
cle his bad inference that competition in religion is as 
wholesome as in trade. As the battle with the com- 
mon enemy waxes hot, the tactical advantage of the 
" moving square " becomes manifest. Economic con- 
siderations also have their weight in the mind of a 
people naturally thrifty, and common-sense demands 



22 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

to be informed why it should be necessary to keep 
three or four sets of parochial functionaries in pay, 
merely to enable three or four groups of fellow- 
townsmen, who differ in opinion on three or four 
points of belief which nobody accounts essential, to 
enjoy the luxury of being walled off from one another 
while they say their prayers. 

It is no slight step taken towards unity, that this 
mood of dissatisfaction with the actual state of things 
should have become so generally prevalent. Made 
aware of the existence of his ailment, the sick man 
begins to bestir himself to find remedies ; so long as 
the disease lies latent there is nothing to prompt his 
going in search of a cure. We in America have at 
last reached this stage of solicitude. For a long while 
only a voice here and a voice there was to be heard 
protesting against our state of schism ; but now the 
complainants utter themselves in chorus. " Give peace 
in our time," has become common prayer. 

The practical methods of attaining the desired end 
are reducible under three heads : — 

First: The unconditional surrender of all to one. 

Secondly : Confederation upon equal terms, each 
denomination preserving its own proper identity, but 
entering into formal counsel with the others with 
respect to all common interests. 

Thirdly : Consolidation under one self-consistent 
and well understood system of polity and doctrine ; 
with ample constitutional guarantees for a permitted 
diversity in the methods of worship and of work. 



A PROTOCOL. 23 

To a study of the comparative merits of these three 
methods, which for the sake of convenience may be 
given the catch-words " Submission," " Confederation," 
and " Consolidation," I propose devoting the remain- 
der of this -lecture. 

The foremost representative of the doctrine of un- 
conditional surrender as the only proper pathway 
to unity is the Church of Rome. Let American 
Christians, of whatever name, forthwith give in their 
adhesion to the self-styled Queen and Mother of the 
Churches, and the thing is done, the secret of reunion 
has been found, the problem solved, the Ecclesia Ameri- 
cana built. There is a simplicity in the suggestion 
that commends it. So short a cross-path to his desti- 
nation is singularly attractive to the foot-sore pilgrim, 
who would gladly, if he might, sing his last song of 
degrees, and enter with thanksgiving the city that is 
at unity in itself. But the maxim, " All roads lead 
to Rome," does not apply in lands severed from Italy 
by the pathless sea, and certain facts both of ancient 
and of contemporary history, to which we cannot 
shut our eyes, make dead against the notion that 
our help in this matter is coming to us from the 
seven hills. 

The Roman claim, subjected to analysis, resolves 
itself into the following elements : (1) The a priori 
necessity of one visible head, if the Church is to exist 
as a corporate society on the earth. (2) The au- 
thority given to Peter to act as this visible head. 
(3) The transmission by Peter to his successors in 



24 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

the see of Rome of the visible headship that was his. 
(4) The absence of rival claimants to the supremacy. 

Supplementary to these considerations, which bind 
the whole world if they bind anybody, are certain 
others, supposed to be specially applicable to the 
United States, to wit: (5) The fact of the discovery 
of the New World by a devout Roman Catholic, sail- 
ing under Roman Catholic auspices. (6) The undis- 
puted ecclesiastical jurisdiction exercised by the Holy 
Father on this side of the ocean for more than a 
hundred years before any dissentients had made their 
appearance here. And finally, (7) the need of an au- 
thority backed, in a sense, by the past of all Europe, 
rather than by the traditions of only a single nation, 
if spiritual sovereignty is to be asserted over such a 
medley of foreign stocks and races as the Republic in 
this latter half of the nineteenth century has become. 

It is manifestly impossible in a single lecture to 
enter upon an exhaustive examination of the papal 
claims ; but I can and will indicate briefly the weak 
points of the arguments to which I have just referred. 
To urge that a visible headship is, in the very nature 
of things, essential to the being of such a body as the 
Church of God on earth, is in reality to beg the ques- 
tion at issue. When St. Paul speaks of the ascended 
Christ as having been made "head over all things to 
the Church," he does so without limitation or qualifi- 
cation. He says nothing whatever about vicar or 
vicegerent. He would seem to have been haunted 
by no misgiving as to the impracticability of Christ's 



A PROTOCOL. 25 

ruling his people from a heavenly throne. So far as 
centres of administration are concerned, he betrays 
no preference for one over another, although now 
and then the special personal affection for Jerusalem 
proper to every Hebrew heart asserts itself. 

If, indeed, it could be shown that executive power 
is never efficiently wielded save when lodged with a 
dictator, then the a priori argument for the Papacy 
would have weight. 

But the facts of history are against the acceptance 
of such a postulate. Venice under her Council and 
France under her Directory, to go no farther afield, 
are witnesses that administrative ability is not of 
necessity beholden solely to the " one-man power." 
Nothing could have been more natural than for 
Romans, born under the Empire, to imagine that the 
new society they saw emerging out of the invisible 
would never attain the climax of efficiency without a 
recognized and localized Imperator ; and if the theory 
of papal origins outlined at the beginning of this 
lecture be the true one, such was the way in which 
they did actually reason. But to us looking at the 
matter in the light of the Empire's decline and fall, 
as well as of its birth and growth, it is by no means 
axiomatic that human society to be well ordered must 
needs discover and acknowledge in some one mortal 
man its visible controller. The universe as a whole, 
so Christians believe, is governed by council. We 
recognize in Deity something other and better than 
the bare expression of singleness. Why then assume 



26 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

that of necessity the oversight of the Holy Catholic 
Church in order to be thorough must be lodged with 
a solitary potentate ? The world secular is to-day 
kept in tranquillity by forces emanating from London, 
Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Washington, as 
completely as it ever was when all power centred at 
Rome. If such can be the case in the temporal order, 
why not also in the spiritual ? 

But what if our Lord, it is asked, did actually give 
to Simon Peter the prerogative of supremacy ? Why 
then, of course, for Christians the case is closed, and 
a 'priori reasons either for or against become at once 
irrelevant. We pass therefore from abstract to his- 
torical ground, and look to see what the New Testa- 
ment has to say, or may be supposed to say, in support 
of the Roman claim. It would seem on general prin- 
ciples as if the Epistles credited to St. Peter himself 
ought to yield the desired evidence. The encyclical 
letters of the pontiffs who are supposed to hold from 
him have never been reticent with respect to prerog- 
ative ; and if St. Peter was conscious of possessing 
rights of supremacy over the whole Church, nothing 
could have been more natural than that the fact should 
leave its impress on his correspondence. And yet we 
look in vain to this quarter for a single sentence cor- 
roborative of the claims of the Popes. The Apostle 
does indeed exhort the elders of the Church, but he 
is careful to do it as one who is " also an elder." In 
fact, had he been expressly aiming to avoid the asser- 
tion of an authority different from and superior to 



A PROTOCOL. 27 

that of his fellow Apostles, he could scarcely have 
chosen a tone better fitted for his purpose than that 
which pervades the whole range of his writings. A 
similar poverty of allusion, or rather entire absence of 
allusion, to the Petrine claim is observable in the 
other Epistles ; and when it comes to the Book of 
Acts, Paul is so clearly the hero of the story that 
Peter's prominence in the earlier chapters is almost 
lost out of mind before we reach the end. When the 
case has been narrowed down, as it must be, to the 
four Gospels, we discover that the real issue hangs 
on the right interpretation of three palmary passages ; 
that which records Peter's confession of Jesus as the 
Christ, and our Lord's answering declaration ; ^ that 
in which Christ assures Peter of His having prayed 
for him that his faith fail not ; ^ and that in which, 
after the resurrection, Christ with a most noticeable 
earnestness exhorts Peter by the love he bears Him, 
"Feed my sheep." ^ 

Upon these three texts the Scriptural argument for 
the Papacy really rests. What shall we say to them? 
Briefly this, that so far as the earliest commentators 
on the New Testament are concerned, the Fathers of 
the primitive Church, the Aveight of testimony is 
wholly against the papal interpretation. It was only 
after the Holy See had established itself by other 
means that there was read into these passages the 

1 St. Matt. xvi. 13-20 ; St. Mark viii. 27-29 ; St. Luke ix. 
18-20. 

2 St. Luke xxii. 31, 32. « St. John xxi. 15-18. 



28 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

sense which Roman controversialists now allege as 
the only proper one. In the case of the first of the 
three passages some of the Fathers see in Christ's 
words " this rock " an allusion to Himself, that one 
foundation other than which no man can lay ; some 
understand it to signify the truth of our Lord's divin- 
ity to which Peter had just borne the earliest human 
witness ; while still others connect the promise with 
those providential features in Peter's personal history 
which made him the first stone in that great edifice, 
the building of which is still in progress. In a true 
sense the Church began with Peter, for it was he who 
led at Pentecost, and it was he whose first use of " the 
keys of the kingdom of heaven" threw open to the 
nations the door that had been shut against them so 
long. But Jerusalem and Csesarea, not Rome, are 
the geographical names we associate with these 
greatest of the acts of Peter; and there lies a wide 
gap between assent to the primacy of this foremost 
of the Twelve, and consent to the doctrine that 
dominion has been given to the Bishops of Rome even 
to the end of the world. 

The fact of Peter's leadership among the disciples, 
in itself sufficiently evidenced by the position given 
to his name in all of the lists, is a sufficient clew to 
the meaning of the second of the great papal texts. 
Nothing could be more natural than the singling 
out for special prayer the man who had been bold to 
say, " Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God," 
and nothing could have been more natural than to 



A PROTOCOL. 29 

select Mm to be the streugthener of his brethren in 
their hour of need ; but that this strengthening function 
was not peculiar to the Apostle Peter is evident from 
its being associated in the New Testament with no 
fewer than four of St. Peter's colleagues in the work 
of evangelization. 

With respect to the scene upon the shore of the 
sea of Tiberias, where Jesus said to Simon Peter once, 
" Feed my lambs," twice, " Feed my sheep," the last 
of the alleged Gospel evidences in behalf of the Pa- 
pacy, it would seem to be enough simply to put in 
contrast the view which sees in it an exclusive be- 
stowal of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and that which 
discerns, rather, a singularly tender and touching sug- 
gestion of a duty that appertains to every shepherd 
of souls as such. Peter had three times denied his 
Master ; three times, therefore, does the Master re- 
establish Peter in his pastoral office ; but His doing 
so in no sense disestablishes the rest. If any mystical 
and symbolic inference with respect to the perpetual 
government of the Church is to be forced out of this 
beautiful closing chapter of the Fourth Gospel, it 
would seem as if St. John, rather than St. Peter, 
ought to have the benefit of it, for of him are those 
strange words written, " If I will that he tarry till I 
come, what is that to thee ? " If this thing had been 
said of Simon Peter, what volumes of rhetoric might it 
not have furnished to the upholders of the papal claim? 

But the Homan Catholic argument from the New 
Testament is supplemented by another from tradition. 



30 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

St. Peter, we are assured, was the first bishop of 
Rome, and as such transmitted his plenary powers 
to those who have succeeded him in that see, from 
Linus, the first, to Leo XIIL, the latest of them. 

Protestant writers who spend their strength in try- 
ing to prove that St. Peter never was at Rome make 
a mistake. Very possibly they are right ; but it is pro- 
verbially hard to prove a negative, and in making so 
much effort to demonstrate this particular negative 
they betray a misgiving that unless it can be done 
the case is lost. Even when it has been conceded 
that St. Peter, in the course of his travels, may have 
visited Rome, it by no means follows that he was 
either the exclusive founder or the first bishop of the 
Roman Church. St. Paul prided himself on never 
trespassing on the missionary fields of other Apostles. 
But we have among St. Paul's writings a letter to 
the Church of the Romans. Would he have been 
likely to write his Epistle had there been a bishop 
in charge at Rome ? And supposing that bishop to 
have been no less a dignitary than the Apostle Peter, 
should we find no reference made to him in the long 
list of salutations with which the writer closes his 
communication ? 

An early author of repute (Irenseus) makes St. Peter 
and St. Paul jointly the founders of the Roman Church. 
According to him, Linus was the first bishop of the 
series, not the second, and received his commission 
at the hands of both of the great Apostles. A happy 
omen this of the better day to come, when St. Peter, 



A PROTOCOL. 31 

as the representative of ecclesiastical order, and St. 
Paul, as the representative of the freedom that comes 
with faith, shall strike hands in that " Holy Catholic 
Church " in which, spite of all set-backs and discour- 
agements, those who say the Apostles' Creed continue 
to believe.^ 

But it is still further urged that, in the absence of 
any other claimant, Rome ought to hold supremacy 
by virtue of her being, so to speak, the residuary 
legatee. If Jerusalem, or Antioch, or even Alexan- 
dria had maintained an unbroken line of bishops 
from the beginning, there might be grounds for par- 
titioning the sovereignty among all the survivors, but 
inasmuch as Rome is actually the only survivor, ought 
not the whole inheritance to be hers ?^ 

Yes, perhaps so, if we can agree about what the 
inheritance is. If it be simply an inheritance of fair 
fame, certainly all who value what is ancient for its 
own sake, and who hold that what is time-honored 
ought to be by man honored as well, will concede the 
thing asked for not only cheerfully but thankfully. 
There never has been a time when the Church of 
Rome, if content to be the Church of Rome, would 
not have received from the rest of Christendom her 

^ For an admirable summary of the heads of the Eoman con- 
troversy, see Dr. Salmon's " Infallibility of the Church," a work 
characterized by the late Yon Dollinger as one of the great polem- 
ical achievements of the century. 

2 See " A Letter to his Grace the Duke of Norfolk, on occasion 
of Mr Gladstone's recent Expostulation," by John Henry New- 
man, D.D., of the Oratory, London, 1875, p 26, § 3. 



32 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

full measure of respect. It is not against the Church 
of Rome, it is ao-ainst the self-styled Mother and Mis- 
tress of all the Churches that we have made war, or 
rather are defending ourselves. 

But just as the disproof of the Scriptural argument 
for the supremacy of St. Peter turned the flank of the 
argument from tradition, so the disproof of the a priori 
argument for the necessity of a single visible headship 
over the Church, may be said to have anticipated the 
defeat of this argument from survival. If it could be 
proved that the Church absolutely required for its ef- 
ficiency the recognition of a supreme Pontiff, why then 
the fact that there lived within our horizon only one 
pretender to the post would unquestionably make the 
claim of such survivor a very strong one. But if, on 
the other hand, the supposition in question be, as we 
have seen that it is, a wholly gratuitous one, why then 
Rome's cry, " Come unto me, for there is none other 
whom it is possible for you to seek," falls dead. 

There remain to be considered the supplementary 
arguments that are supposed to make Rome's conten- 
tion a particularly strong one in the case of the 
United States. 

It is hardly possible to take seriously the argument 
that because Christopher Columbus was a Roman 
Catholic, therefore all of us who occupy the new world 
he discovered ought to be of his religion. In the fif- 
teenth century all Europe was under the Papacy ; 
the note of revolt had not yet been sounded, and if 
America was to be discovered by a European it must 



A PROTOCOL. 33 

needs be a Roman Catholic who should discover it. 
The planting of the cross on the soil of San Salvador 
was indeed an act of high significance ; but the Papacy 
can scarcely claim an exclusive interest in the cross, 
a symbol that had acquired its significance long before 
St. Peter is alleged even to have seen Rome. 

The claim founded upon a long continued assertion 
of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the New World, would 
carry greater weight in this connection than it does, 
if it could be shown that the jurisdiction was ever to 
any considerable extent either exercised or acknowl- 
edged on the Atlantic seaboard in the colonial period ; 
or in other words, had the people who in 1789 consti- 
tuted themselves a republic, ever recognized the right 
of the Roman Pontiff to reign over them. We know 
that the contrary was notoriously the fact. Perhaps a 
moiety of the Marylanders were Roman Catholic ; but 
over against these stood multitudes whose very pres- 
ence here was owing to their hatred of whatever even 
so much as approximated to the religion of Rome. 
In the Spanish possessions, and in what had been the 
French, the Roman Catholic Church had an unques- 
tioned foothold ; but Canada and Florida lay ]}eyond 
the limits of the Re|)ublic, and what was true of them 
was not true of it. Substantially this was an Eng- 
lishman's country when it set out upon its course, 
and it was England that had been "the bulwark of 
the Reformation." 

Yes, the Roman Catholic replies, an Englishman's 
country it was once, but an Englishman's country 



34 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

it long ago ceased to be. Europe has poured itself 
into America, and to-day what is needed to effect 
the unifying process is such a power as can appeal 
to memories that are common to all the national- 
ities of the Old World. There is no such power, 
save the Papacy. 

The answer to this is two-fold. A reconciliation 
imposed upon us from abroad and by an extraneous 
power is not the sort of reconciliation of which we 
are in search. As a people, we think that we can 
best settle om^ family quarrel among ourselves. But 
aside from this, is there not good reason to think that 
the extent of the Europeanizing process covered by 
the last fifty years has been grossly exaggerated ? It 
is true that there has been an immense infusion of 
foreign blood ; but is it true that this has sufficed 
really to overmaster the original strain ? There is 
good authority for the statement that of the people 
now inhabiting the territory of the United States 
considerably more than half are the direct descend- 
ants of grandparents or great-grandparents who 
were living here in the year 1800. Moreover, law 
and language are forces that link us almost indis- 
solubly to an English past. Our common law is 
English. The " free institutions " of which we are 
so proud are of English parentage. Above all, our 
speech is English. The affectionate appeals of the 
Holy Father calling us back to our allegiance have 
to be translated. The ring of the sentences is so- 
norous, but our ears miss the mother element. The 



A PROTOCOL. 35 

children of our public schools, from whatever quarter 
of the globe they may have come, are taught to think, 
to speak, to write in English. Sentences from the 
great masters of English letters, snatches of English 
oratory, couplets of English verse creep into their 
minds, and stay there moulding thought and action 
in a thousand unsuspected ways. The importance of 
this fact it is quite impossible to overstate. Here 
and there in the vast stretch of our possessions little 
areas are to be found where bi-lingual education has 
to be tolerated for a time ; but it is only for a time. 
The English language has a grasp upon this country 
that can by no means be shaken off, and even race 
distinctions, deeply rooted as they are, must sooner or 
later inevitably yield to the formative touch of this 
all-conquering tongue. As yet, the Roman ecclesias- 
tics and theologians, born Roman, have not acquired 
the power of writing English with much force. In 
this department of their propaganda they have been 
dependent on recruits from the Anglican ranks. Un- 
til they shall have acquired this gift of utterance, the 
mere fact that the population of the United States, 
classified by its race affinities, represents the whole of 
Europe, will not greatly help their missionary effort. 

I have thought it right to deal thus promptly with 
the Roman Catholic claims, for the simple reason that 
if these are valid, any further discussion of means 
and methods must prove superfluous. If our first 
duty as Christians be to obey the voice that says to 
us from Peter's chair, '' Come unto me," why then 



36 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

the case is closed. America, on that supposition, has 
only to do what England did when Queen Mary suc- 
ceeded to King Edward, namely, to haul down the 
flag of the Reformation, and to give up the ship. 

There is, however, an alternative form of uncon- 
ditional surrender to which I ought perhaps to make 
at least a passing reference before we take our final 
leave of this first of the three theories of unity, the 
theory of submission. There are a few souls san- 
guine enough to imagine it possible that the absolute 
submission refused to the Roman Pontiff, may still 
be secured at the dictate of the Anglican Episcopacy. 
Let all dissentients at once give in their allegiance 
to the Protestant Episcopal Church ; conform to the 
canons of the General Convention, and consent to 
worship publicly no otherwise than in accordance 
with the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer, and 
the thing is done. We have our Church of America 
off-hand and without vexatious delay. But if Angli- 
canism pure and simple, with all the adventitious aids 
it enjoys in the land of its birth, with all the charm 
that ancient architecture can lend and all the pres- 
tige old national traditions and long inherited titles 
avail to foster, has nevertheless failed to keep within 
one fold even the half of the people of Great Britain, 
is it to be supposed that any new summons, issued at 
this late day, " Go to, become forthwith what we 
are," is likely to win submission. 

Happily it has ceased to be any longer necessary to 
argue seriously against this form of the doctrine of un- 



A PROTOCOL. 37 

conditional surrender, for the reason that the bishops 
of the English-speaking race, in council assembled, 
have themselves given it a quietus. Bj the Declaration 
set forth at Chicago in 1886, and ratified at Lambeth 
in 1888, the Anglican Communion throughout the 
world committed itself, so far as by the voice of its 
chief pastors it could be committed, to a far larger 
and more generous platform of unity than any of 
wliich the frame rs of the Act of Uniformity ever 
dreamed. But I am anticipating matters by this 
reference. I was led into making it because other- 
wise our study of the various phases of the submission 
doctrine would have been incomplete. 

We have next to consider the theory of ecclesias- 
tical unity through confederation, the second of the 
three methods that have found advocates. The con- 
federative theory contemplates some such combina- 
tion of the various religious bodies of the land as 
would exist in the case of labor unions, were there a 
single General Assembly empowered to legislate for 
them all in matters of common interest, while yet 
each separate union retained control over the affairs 
of its own trade. Under this scheme denomination- 
alism would not cease to be, but its more flagrant 
evils might conceivably be diminished; the conduct of 
missions, for example, being relegated to the General 
Assembly, and the heathen thus saved the scandal of 
being called to look upon a piebald Christianity. In 
short " confederation " is but another name for some 



38 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

modus vivendi under which we might live along to- 
gether very much as we are living now, only in rather 
pleasanter mutual relations than at present, with more 
of concert and with less of friction. That the pro- 
posal has a certain plausibility upon the face of it, 
it is needless to deny. It has the great advantage of 
involving a minimum of change. So deep rooted have 
our denominational traditions grown to be, so vast are 
the property interests at stake, so complicated is the 
network of missionary and educational enterprise to 
which the various religious bodies stand committed, 
that any scheme of unity which proposes at the outset 
to hold all these things harmless and to ensure their 
integrity for an indefinite time future, is sure to win 
at least a momentary approval. 

But confederation weighed in the balances is found 
wanting. In itself considered, it is the weakest of all 
the forms of unity, and the least stable. Its proper 
symbol is the fagot, which has unity indeed, but 
unity of a very precarious sort, fragile, ill-compacted, 
easily terminable. The parts of a confederacy are 
mechanically not chemically combined ; they hold 
together less by affinity than by cohesion. Confeder- 
acy has no power to weather tribulation, the mere 
touch of trouble makes shipwreck of it. We Ameri- 
cans tried confederation as our first experiment in 
the direction of national unity ; and a very poor thing 
we found it. Our Constitution grew directly out of 
a desire for '' a more perfect union " than the mere 
bundling process of confederation could bring to pass. 



A PROTOCOL. 39 

In fact, there are no two words in the political vocabu- 
lary of Americans more conspicuously ill-omened than 
'' confederacy " and " confederation." They are words 
synonymous with transitoriness and failure ; no 
slightest promise of permanence is to be found in 
them. If all this be true of the confederative idea as 
it stands related to national interests and the life of 
states, how much more impracticable is the applica- 
tion of the principle to our ecclesiastical condition. 
If the confederation of communities each of which 
occupies a well-ascertained geographical area, and 
has a certain personal identity of its own, is a thing 
compassed about with difficulty, what shall we say to 
a scheme that proposes to bind together by treaty 
ties social organizations that already cover the same 
space, and recognize no territorial boundary lines ? 

We can imagine France resolving itself into a con- 
federacy, and giving to each one of its present De- 
partments a sovereignty of its own. Such an act 
would be a step backward, but it is conceivable. Is 
it co'nceivable, however, that the French, in despair 
over their partisan condition, should vote to allow the 
adherents of each of the great parties to organize 
according to its own notion of political wisdom, — the 
Bonapartists carrying on an empire, the Legitimists 
an absolute monarchy, the Orleanists a limited mon- 
archy, the Moderates a republic, and the Reds a com- 
mune, all at the same time, and within the limits of 
the same France, — provided only they agree to fash- 
ion themselves into a confederation ? This is really, 



40 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

when we look the facts in the face, what Christian 
Unity would mean here in America under a scheme of 
denominational confederation. It would be an attempt 
to knit together for working purposes methods of 
polity that from the very nature of things cannot 
co-exist in one and the same system. It would be a 
clearing-house, not a Church. 

Denominational confederation has been ably urged 
upon us under the attractive phrase, '' The United 
Churches of the United States." ^ If one might be 
permitted to drop out two letters from this taking 
title, so that it should read " The United Church of 
the United States," the words would then express the 
very thing we need. But the lurking fallacy in the 
expression as it stands is this ; a parallelism is sug- 
gested which does not exist. The " States " that 
make up the national Union are territorial and social 
entities, each of which has its well-defined metes and 
bounds ; whereas the Churches out of which it is pro- 
posed to construct the ecclesiastical Union are bodies 
of men scattered, with a greater or less evenness 
of distribution, over the whole country, and, what is 
still more to the point, each of them organized with 

1 See " The United Churches of the United States," by the 
Rev. Charles W. Shields, D. T>., in the " Century Magazine " for 
November, 1885. The allusion in the text must by no means be 
understood as indicating any failure on the writer's part to appre- 
ciate the immense value of the service rendered by Professor 
Shields to the cause of Christian unity. No one has done more 
than he to waken in the people of this country a sense of whole- 
some shame at the spectacle of their "unhappy divisions," 



A PROTOCOL. 41 

a view to ministering to the spiritual needs of the 
whole country. If the supposed case of the confed- 
erated labor-unions be urged as furnishing a more 
serviceable analogy, the reply is obvious, that the 
various trades aithough not segregated in space are 
segregated as respects the ends they have severally 
in view. They have therefore a certain separateness 
that makes confederation possible. The Bricklayers' 
Union aspires to do all the bricklaying, and the Car- 
penters' Union aspires to do all the joinery-work 
needed by the people of the United States. The 
bricklayers have no desire to touch a single stick of 
timber, nor do the carpenters wish to lay a single 
brick. Not such is the case as it stands between the 
Baptists and the Presbyterians. The Baptists have it 
for their aim, so far as in them lies, to make Christians 
of all the people of the land ; and the Presbyterians 
have it for their aim to do the very same thing. 
Unless they can find a better sort of unity than " con- 
federation " offers, they must from the very nature of 
the case continue what they are now, rivals in t]ie 
same field, competitive rather than co-operant. 

With " submission " and " confederation," both of 
them discarded, there remains as a final resort the 
method of consolidation ; more fully defined already 
as a union under one self-consistent and well-under- 
stood system of polity and doctrine, with ample con- 
stitutional guarantees for a permitted diversity in the 
methods of worship and of work. The theory of con- 
solidation differs from the theorv of submission which 



42 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

it may be charged with resembling in this, that al- 
though it does undoubtedly presuppose the selection 
of one denomination from among the rest to form 
a rallying centre, it provides at the same time for the 
generous inclusion and careful conservation of what- 
ever the re-entering companies of believers count most 
precious among their heirlooms. Every one of the 
great denominations has its own hallowed memories, 
its own roll of martyrs, its own cherished manner of 
worship, its own long-tried methods of missionary 
work, above all its own revered type of Christian 
character. There is no reason why sudden violence 
should be done to these sacred things. The theory 
of submission would compel their prompt abandon- 
ment. The theory of consolidation supposes not 
only their permitted but their constitutionally guarded 
continuance. Take divine service, for example ; con- 
solidation would not involve the displacement of ex- 
temporaneous methods of worship among those who 
value them, by an insistence upon either the Missal 
or the Prayer-book, but on the contrary would guard 
the preferences of the non-liturgical families in the 
one household as jealously as it would protect those 
whose traditions were of the other sort. There would 
be nothing to forbid the recognition, in a truly Catho- 
lic American Church, of a Puritan rite, an Anglican 
rite, a Latin rite, and a German rite. Such diversities 
of method in the line of worship might perfectly well 
co-exist under one general and comprehensive scheme 
of polity. Such titles as " Episcopalian," and " Pres- 



A PROTOCOL. 43 

byteriaii," and " Congregationalist " would have to go 
by the board, because these would indicate a real 
schism in the body, a state of things like that just now 
supposed in the case of a re-organized France ; but 
the disappearance of these names would by no means 
necessarily involve the loss of anything that is really 
precious in the spiritual possessions of the communions 
at present burdened with them. In fact it would be a 
distinct impoverishment, rather than a gain, were we to 
lose the fine types of character ^hich the denominations 
I have mentioned have severally cultivated and ma- 
tured. We should be merging our differences to little 
purpose, if in the process we were to forfeit any con- 
siderable portion of the treasures accumulated by the 
several tribes during their years of exile and separa- 
tion. In the Catholic Church of America there must 
be room for the stern virtues of the Covenanter, as 
well as for the gentler qualities that make the devout 
follower of George Fox lovable, and the Anglican 
type of sainthood attractive. True catholicity can 
never come about as the result of either an eclectic 
or a levelling process. There is nothing manufactured 
or artificial about it. It never was or will be made 
to order. It manifests itself spontaneously and grows 
as the flowers grow, when once the multitude of the 
brethren consent to dwell together in unity. How^ 
then, can even so much as a beginning be made ? 
Supposing what I have called consolidation upon a 
definite and well-understood basis, or, as it might be 
otherwise expressed, crystallization about a fixed 



44 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

nucleus, to have been accepted as the true principle ; 
by what law of natural or spiritual selection can we 
imagine the desired discrimination wrought, the 
right basis or nucleus determined? We can think of 
various possible criteria, by aid of which a decision 
might be reached, if only all could be counted upon to 
acquiesce in, and to abide by the result. There is, 
for example, the criterion of antiquity. Were this 
test accepted (as, taken by itself, it certainly would 
not be), the question ^^ould be narrowed down to a 
choice between the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic 
Churches, both of which bodies have an historic life 
that antedates the Reformation. Again, there is the 
criterion of numbers, — a favorite standard of judg- 
ment with all democracies. Were this accepted, the 
Methodists or the Baptists would have claims such as 
no competing organizations could dispute. Yet again, 
Congregationalists and Presbyterians might very 
properly plead the large influence their ideas have 
exercised upon the growth of American institutions, 
as a reason why one or other of them should be taken 
as the basis of the United Church. Between them 
these two bodies dominated the period of the Eng- 
lish Commonwealth, and if the Republic be, as in a 
real sense and in a certain measure it imdoubtedly 
is, the child of the Commonwealth and the heir of its 
political philosophy, that in itself is a strong i^rima 
facie argument in favor of entrusting our ecclesiasti- 
cal destinies to the same hands that under God have 
so largely shaped our national and civil fortunes. 



A PROTOCOL. 45 

But even supposing ourselves to have reached a 
point where we acknowledge that a choice between 
these various rallying centres is desirable, there still 
remains the stubborn question, Who is to choose ? 
There is no dictator who can settle the point by 
throwing his sword into the scale ; for we have agreed 
that this is a matter to which the sword is wholly 
irrelevant, and we have ruled dictators out of court. 
Resort to the ballot would be ludicrous, and a general 
election impossible. The putting of the Roman Em- 
pire up at auction was a scandal, but the sending of 
all Christians to the polls to vote upon a proposed 
constitution for the Kingdom of Heaven would be 
a greater. 

No, there is nothing to be done, but for each of the 
existing organizations of those within our borders 
who profess and call themselves Christians, to apply 
itself to the study of the problem, and having done 
so to set forth in the fewest and plainest words pos- 
sible, the result of its thinking. Let us hear from 
each denomination what, in its deliberate judgment, is 
the most generous platform of union it can conscien- 
tiously offer to the rest. Once in possession of these 
ultimata our American Christendom as a whole will 
be in a far better condition to form a judgment than 
it is to-day. When it is found, as doubtless it will 
be found, that the resemblances between the various 
formulas of concord are far more striking than the 
differences, such a cry for unity will go up from the 
whole nation as shall assuredly enter into the ears of 



46 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

the Lord of Sabaoth and bring the answer He alone 
can give. 

One of our denominations, as it happens, has done 
this very thing ah'eady, and is first in the field with 
its suggestion of the true basis of unity. The sugges- 
tion may be a mistaken one. There may inhere in it 
some fatal logical or historical flaw. It claims no 
note of infallibility, but as a suggestion it has at least 
one merit, the merit of having been made. 

The Chicago-Lambeth platform, as it may fairly 
enough be called, sets forth that the data essential to 
the establishment of a visible unity among Christians 
are as follows : — 

First. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New 
Testament as containing all things necessary to Sal- 
vation, and as being the rule and ultimate standard of 
faith. 

Secondly. The Apostles' Creed as the Baptismal 
symbol ; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient state- 
ment of the Christian Faith. 

Thirdly. The two Sacraments ordained by Christ 
Himself, — Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, — 
ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of 
institution, and of the elements ordained by Him. 

Fourthly. The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted 
in the methods of its administration to the varying 
needs of the nations and peoples called of God into 
the unity of his Church.^ 

This is the answer of the Bishops of the Anglican 

^ Official Report of the Lambeth Conference of 1888, \\ 86. 



A PROTOCOL. 47 

faith and order throughout the world to the question, 
What do Anglicans account the minimum of agree- 
ment prerequisite to any practical steps toward the 
achievement of a bona fide unity ? My purpose in 
these lectures will be to unfold the contents of this 
utterance of theirs, and to set forth as clearly as 
possible the bearings of it. Firmly persuaded myself 
of the solidity of the ground taken by the Bishops, I 
do not pretend to an attitude of indifferentism, Ijut 
frankly confess myself an advocate. It is needless to 
say that I speak with no authority other than that of 
one who has given the subject patient thought. In 
the last resort the Bishops must be their own inter- 
preters ; no commentator can force a meaning upon 
their words which they themselves are unwilling to 
avow. And yet it is to be remembered that the 
general judgment of mankind is but the aggregate 
of the personal judgments of the members of the 
race ; and however valueless a solitary expression 
of opinion or belief may seem, those who sit over 
against the treasui-y of truth do ill to flout it 
altogether. 

The coral insect lives and dies far down under the 
surface of the sea. A tiny speck of solid substance 
hidden out of sight is all his memorial. By and by, 
overhead there rises up an island ; groves of palm 
are on it ; birds build their nests tliere, and at last 
men their homes. 



II. 

THE ARCHIVES. 



The Christian character in its completeness is the result and outgrowth 
of all that series of events of Avhich the Bible is ia part, but in the most im- 
portant part, the record . . . The Bible exhibits it in various stages, in 
various forms, not always perfect, yet always going on to what is higher 
and purer, and shown to us at last, after the passage of so many ages and 
generations, so many efforts and failures and slow steps of progress, in its 
finished and flawless perfectness in the person of the divine Son of Man. 

— Richard William Church. 

I have been forced by the peculiar circumstances of my work to regard 
from many sides the difficulties which beset our historic faith. If 1 know 
by experience their significance and their gravity; if I readily allow that on 
many points I wish for fuller light: then I claim to be heard when I say 
without reserve that I have found each region of anxious trial fruitful in 
blessing; that I found my devout reverence for every word of the Bible 
quickened and deepened, when I have acknowledged that it demands the 
exercise of every faculty with which I have been endowed, and, that as 
it touches the hfe of man at every point, it welcomes for its fuller under- 
standing the help which comes from every gain of human knowledge. 

— Brooke Foss Westcott. 

I have always been strongly in favor of secular education, in the sense 
of education without theology,- but I must confess I have been no less se- 
riously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, 
which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present 
utterly chaotic state of opmion upon these matters, without the use of the 
Bible. — Thomas Henry Huxley. 



II. 

THE ARCHIVES. 

First in their list of essentials the Bishops at 
Lambeth placed the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, 
characterizing them thus : " The Holy Scriptures of 
the Old and Neiv Testaments^ as ' containim/ all things 
necessary to salvation^'' and as being the rule and ulti- 
mate standard of faith." 

The statement that Holy Scripture " containeth all 
things necessary to salvation " has a positive and a 
negative side. Positively, it asserts that in Holy 
Scripture " things necessary to salvation" are to be 
found ; negatively, it withholds from any and every 
extra-Scriptural demand upon our faith, the power to 
bind. The statement, on its affirmative side, does 
not allege that a knowledge of all things in Holy 
Scripture is necessary to salvation ; nor yet on its 
negative side does it declare that nothing beyond the 
range of Holy Scripture is good to be believed ; but 
that which by implication is averred is, that if we 
want to lind the things essential to the soul's safety, 
we shall do well to look into the Scriptures rather 
than elsewhere to find them ; and that which by im- 
l)lication is denied is, that anything over and above 
what Scripture sets forth ought to be counted among 



52 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

the possessions which the soul must have if it would 
escape eternal loss. On the one hand, therefore, the 
statement is exclusive of the merely literary view 
which sees in the Bible only one among many collec- 
tions of writings alleged to be sacred ; while, on the 
other, it opposes itself to the Roman Catholic doc- 
trine that we must supplement Scripture by Tradition 
if we wish to be well assured of " all things necessary 
to salvation." Accordingly, I propose to take up in 
this connection the general question, — How ought 
we of these times to think about the Bible ? Or, to 
put it otherwise. Has anything occurred in the in- 
tellectual movement of our day to compel a change 
of attitude on the part of reasonable men towards the 
book, or books, heretofore dignified by the title Word 
of God ? Have such words as " revelation " and " in- 
spiration " really become meaningless, or if not quite 
meaningless, at any rate so thoroughly diluted as to 
be void of any distinctive flavor ? In short, do the 
Bishops betray themselves as men belated and be- 
hind their time when they speak to us of the Bible as 
being "the rule and ultimate standard of faith" ? I 
make bold to answer these questions in the negative. 
I hope to be able to give sound reasons for believing 
that the unique character hitherto conceded to the 
Christian Scriptures is destined to continue to attach 
to them ; that the Bible substantially as it is may be 
counted upon to survive the shock of criticism, and 
to stand, as it has stood, the accredited classic of 
religion, a hand-book of belief indispensable to man. 



THE ARCHIVES. 63 

My method will not be that of minute inquiry into 
questions of date and authorship connected with the 
various books of the Bible, a task for which I am not 
adequately furnished, and which I could only accom- 
plish as a borrower; but, instead, such a discussion 
of the first principles involved in the question at 
issue, as will demand of those whom I address no 
other preparative than that always praiseworthy pos- 
session, an open mind. I cannot help thinking that 
on such a line I shall better succeed in justifying the 
prominence given in the Lambeth platform to the 
Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, 
than if I were to bewilder you with citations and 
overload your memories with dates. 

Can God disclose his mind to man ? 

Has He at any time or times actually done so ? 

Is there record of such disclosure or disclosures ? 

Have we such a record in the writings that col- 
lectively make up the Bible ? 

These are simple questions which it is perfectly 
possible to deal with in a plain and intelligible way. 
To have them answered for us is to have the mind 
set permanently at rest with respect to what is most 
central to religion. 

I begin with the remark that so far as the intellec- 
tual life of the race is concerned, there can be no 
denying that it has, from time to time, received im- 
pulse and acceleration from the impact of new truth 
announced at the lips of men called discoverers. 
Sometimes in groups and clusters, sometimes singly 



54 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

and at long intervals, men have come upon the scene 
equipped to teach their fellow-men things not before 
known. The gap that separates these men of genius, 
as they are commonly called, from the rank and file 
of their fellow-students in the lower class-room is 
so portentously wide, that evolution is overtaxed in 
the effort to account for their appearance upon any 
theory of progress by infinitesimal increments. It is 
true that we must distinguish between such discov- 
eries as are the product of profound and long-sus- 
tained reflection, and those that have been happened 
upon by what we call chance. In the case of certain 
discoveries, that of anaesthesia, for example, there is 
no evidence of genius whatsoever. The thing was 
blundered into, not reasoned out ; and the same may 
be said of countless chance findings that pass in the 
books under the same general head with those great 
disclosures that have followed upon hard thinking. 
The mere discovery of a new star, or of a hundred 
new stars, is a small matter as compared with the 
glory of discerning, for the first time, one of the 
structural principles involved in the celestial me- 
chanics ; and even to have added an item to the cat- 
alogue of the chemical elements is an achievement 
in no measure comparable with the working out of 
a fresh rationale of the molecular motions. Of the 
discoverers of great principles my remark holds good, 
that the difference between them and other men is 
so sharply accentuated as almost to warrant us in 
thinking it one of kind rather than of degree. 



THE ARCHIVES. 55 

Of such men as Galileo and Newton, the most 
natural account would seem to be that they were 
sent into the world so marvellously endowed for the 
express purpose of communicating a message and 
bestowing a blessing. If the universe had a con- 
scious designer, and all theists, whether Christian 
or not, must so believe, the great truths of the 
mathematics are common to his mind and to ours. 
That one after another of these truths should have 
come to light among us, we are accustomed to 
explain by saying that Euclid lived, that Kepler 
lived ; but why not go farther back, and say : God 
lives, who by the lips of his servant Euclid has taught 
us the properties of angles, and at the mouth of his 
servant Kepler has revealed to us the principles of 
curves ? Of course it is possible for the materialist 
to block any such movement back towards the pur- 
poseful Author and Maker by a flat denial of any con- 
sciousness in the universe other than that of which 
each one of us knows himself to be possessed ; but, as 
I just intimated, my appeal is to the theists, not to 
the atheists. Under a theistic scheme of evolution, 
nothing could be more reasonable than to picture 
God educating his creature man by a succession of 
messengers empowered to impart truth as fast as the 
pupil shall be found " able to bear it." Not only so ; 
we can imagine Him using races as well as individ- 
uals for teachers, and as apprenticing man first to this 
people, then to that, according to the need to be met. 
Such a theory has, of course, its margin of unex- 



5Q THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

plained phenomena ; it does not satisfactorily account 
for everything ; but is there a single one among the 
great generalizations of science that can show a map 
with no shadowed patches, no tracts or even zones 
that have to be marked " unexplored " ? Accepted 
as a working hypothesis, the theistic interpretation of 
history clears up a greater number of dark places than 
any other interpretation that has been suggested. As 
a matter of fact, we find the world indebted for its 
advancement to certain definite individuals, and to 
certain definite races, as to no other individuals and 
to no other races. The whole family has been in 
pupilage to one great man after another ; to one 
select race after another ; has gone to school, as we 
may say, now in Phoenicia, now at Athens, now at 
Jerusalem. To discover a purpose in all this, to 
catch the outline of a plan, is surely not the unintel- 
ligent thing some would have us account it. If there 
be a more reasonable method of explaining what our 
eyes see, let us by all means be told what it is. 

The link between these thoughts and the subject in 
hand is obvious. The Christian plea for the Scriptures 
is that they contain disclosures not elsewhere to be 
found with respect to the character and purposes of 
God, and the duty and destiny of man. It is not 
asserted that no intimations upon these weighty mat- 
ters are to be found in literatures other than the 
Hebrew, for one need only be tolerably well-informed 
in order to know that the contrary is the fact. But 
intimations are very different things from disclosures. 



THE ARCHIVES. 57 

The Christian contention is that to one selected peo- 
ple, there was given for the sake of, and with a view to, 
all the other peoples of the earth, a knowledge of cer- 
tain great verities wholly undiscoverable by the ordi- 
nary processes of human intelligence. It is one thing 
for a document to be generally pervaded by what we 
may call a religious or spiritual tone ; the sacred books 
of the East give voluminous evidence that such is the 
case. But it is quite another thing for a writing to 
acquire sacredness because of the serious and down- 
right way in which it sets forth such statements as 
that God has sent his Son into the world, that Christ 
is risen from the dead, that the time is coming in 
which there shall be new heavens and a new earth. 
These, and the like, are announcements as distinct, 
and certainly as grave, as the announcement, " The 
world goes around the sun ; " " Every particle of 
matter attracts every other particle with a force in- 
versely proportional to the square of the distance." 
Moreover, it is to be observed that the truths in ques- 
tion are not presented to us in the Bible as the out- 
come of the broodings of devout souls ; they are put 
into the form of messages. God, it is declared, has 
sent us word that things are thus and so between 
Him and us, and that certain events are destined to 
come to pass for which we are bound to be ready. 

I lay stress upon this point in the hope that by doing 
so I may disabuse some minds of the notion that if we 
will only be patient, natural science, which has already 
done so much to widen the area of our knowledge, 



58 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

will confer upon us the still further boon of a demon- 
strable religion. Natural science deals with number, 
mass, and force ; it can count and weigh and register ; 
but of the relations of persons to one another it 
neither knows nor professes to know anything at all. 
No conceivable enlargement of our acquaintance with 
the material world can ever give us the answer to the 
weightier questions of religion, for these are all of 
them personal. Even though the arithmetic of the 
heavens and the earth were to be worked out to the last 
figure, — every star tabulated, every period computed, 
every atom weighed, — we should still be as far as ever 
from finding the solution of the problems that lie 
most heavily upon the mind. If God have what we 
understand by personality, that is to say, self-con- 
sciousness and will, we as persons must stand related 
to Him in some definite way ; He must have a purpose 
with respect to us, and we a duty towards Him. 

But how can natural science help us here ? It can 
indeed throw some light upon the care that must be 
taken of the body, if it is to be kept healthy ; and 
since man's trusteeship of his five senses is a doc- 
trine of religion, we need not deny to such sciences 
as anatomy and physiology, a certain auxiliary value 
in making us more fully acquainted with our duty 
towards Grod. But the care of the body is only one 
department of religion. Man is not adequately con- 
sidered when we think of him only in his solitariness 
as an individual. Account has to be taken of the 
thousand and one complications that arise as soon as 



THE ARCHIVES. 59 

you bring man into contact with his fellow-men, and 
look at him in the light of father, brother, neighbor, 
townsman, citizen. 

In this region of man's social relations, natural 
science, strictly so called, can help us not at all. 
Such mixed sciences as sociology and political econ- 
omy can indeed throw light upon the matter ; they 
can minister to the needs of the body politic, just as 
we have seen that anatomy and physiology can minis- 
ter to the needs of the body physical ; but even they, 
when confronted with the blunt question. Why must 
1 do right, when every instinct in me is prompting 
me to do otherwise ? are powerless to give a satisfac- 
tory answer. Confessing no God, they have no room 
in their vocabulary for the word Ought. But if 
science, even when mixed with too many foreign in- 
gredients to allow of our speaking of it as " pure," 
is clearly unequal to the task of telling men in what 
manner and on what terms they ought to live with 
one another, how utterly incompetent it must be to 
instruct them in the right way of living with their 
God I Christians believe that upon this highest of all 
subjects intelligence has been received by message. 
God, they say, has declared his will, and given his 
commandment ; nay, more than this, has to a certain 
limited extent revealed his purpose. If there have 
been disclosures in physics, why doubt that there have 
also been disclosures in ethics ? Did Newton's Prin- 
cipia throw any more light on the motions of stars, 
than Moses in the Decalogue threw upon the relations 



60 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

of souls ? Is it not the better conclusion then, that 
both men were revealers, chosen of God to be such, 
sent here to tell us new truth ? Or, again, take such 
questions as touch the future, and consider how help- 
less we are, apart from the aid given us by disclosure. 
Interesting as is the problem of origins, the problem 
of destiny is more so. That our tenancy of this 
planet had a beginning is demonstrable ; that it will 
have an ending is therefore probable ; but what sort of 
an ending ? Is there nothing better in store for the 
round world than the becoming either an ice-pack or a 
cinder ? To this question natural science, as at pres- 
ent informed, says No. But Christians hold that 
however things may fcurn out with the globe itself, 
we who live upon it have received by message certain 
definite and precious promises, that assure to the 
family a brighter destiny than awaits the homestead. 

In other words, natural science can predict the 
world's physical future, with a certain measure of 
accuracy ; but religion alone professes to have any- 
thing to tell as to the moral and spiritual issues 
wrapped up with the great fact that an end certainly 
is to come. Science can prophesy in a sense ; there 
are certain things it can foretell ; but if the prophecy 
is to be translated, the meaning of the writing shown, 
the real issues determined, a Daniel must be called to 
judgment, one " in whom is the spirit of the holy 
Gods," a messenger competent to interpret and to 
declare. 

The whole question, therefore, resolves itself into 



THE ARCHIVES. 61 

one of credentials. Are these voices to which Chris- 
tians have given assent trustworthy ? Can the mes- 
sengers, the witnesses, the interpreters, call them 
which you choose, stand the cross-questioning to 
which the modern spirit is determined to subject all 
comers who make a claim upon its confidence ? We 
are living in the midst of this cross-questioning pro- 
cess ; it is going on before our eyes ; the witnesses 
are under fire ; and the world, looking on, abides the 
result. But you and I cannot afford to sit aside with 
folded hands, waiting for a verdict that may not be 
announced at the lips of the learned for a century to 
come. What are we to do ? How are we to settle 
for ourselves the question of credibility ? In precisely 
the same way, I venture to suggest, that the specta- 
tors at an ordinary trial, who are not themselves in 
the jury box, make up their minds as to the rights 
and wrongs of the question at issue ; namely, by 
looking the witnesses squarely in the face and forming 
an independent judgment as to their honesty. In a 
deeper sense than the poet himself imagined is " full 
assurance " sometimes " given by looks." It is possi- 
ble with one's Bible in hand to look Moses, Isaiah, St. 
John, St. Paul, not to name the holiest of all the 
names, directly in the eye, and to answer to one's own 
satisfaction the question. Is this man a deceiver, or do 
his features bear the stamp of honesty ? Even in Old 
Testament times, uncritical as we are assured those 
times were, it was customary to subject all who gave 
themselves forth as messengers of God and unveilers 



62 THE PEACE OF THE CHpRg^. 

of his mind, to very searching tests j^ Thfey discrim- 
inated carefully between prophets an^ " false proph- 
ets," the men who had the genuine ^ft of vision and 
the men who only pretended to have if. " Woe unto 
the false prophets," vehemently exclaimed one of the 
true ones, " who follow their own spirit and have 
seen nothing." Doubtless the method of detecting 
the false prophets was that simple oiie which I have 
called " looking in the face." Insincerity has a way 
of betraying itself, if not upon the moment, sooner or 
later. The holy prophets which have been since the 
world began, have held their own all these centuries, 
because the successive generations of men have found 
that good, and only good, came of taking them at 
their word. To the argument in their favor afforded 
by the very manner of their speech, has been added 
the argument which credits a tree with goodness be- 
cause of the goodness of the fruit ; and the two argu- 
ments taken together have been very helpful to plain 
people, as in fact they are likely to continue to be. 

But we are told that the time has come when it is 
fatal to the life of any religion that it should be under 
the necessity of confessing itself a " book-religion " ; 
and that since this is a confession which Christianity 
must needs make, the inference necessarily follows 
that the days of Christianity are numbered. What 
shall we say to this ? First of all, that we are not in 
the least degree ashamed of making our confession. 
The fact is as alleged ; it is impossible to deny that, 
for better or for worse, the fortunes of Christ's reli- 



THE ARCHIVES. 63 

gion have been knitted to a book. There is no escap- 
ing this. The real downfall of the Bible would mean 
the break-up of Christendom. It is of no avail to 
argue that because the Church was in existence before 
the manuscripts, so equally it might endure and flour- 
ish if bereft'of them. A word-of-mouth gospel sufficed 
so long as men who had had " perfect understanding 
of all things from the very first " were still alive to 
tell their story ; but with the passing away of that 
generation there came in the need of an authenticated 
record, a trustworthy chronicle, a written recital of 
facts. This need has existed from then till now, and 
must continue to exist so long as the conditions of 
human life are what they are. 

Equally futile is the assurance that no matter what 
may happen to the letter of the Bible, the spirit of it 
is certain to survive. Doubtless the spirit of ether 
survives the breaking of the bottle in which it has 
been kept ; but survives where ? A Christianity so 
thinly diffused as to be nowhere definitely discover- 
able will prove a sorry help in the work-a-day process 
of bettering mankind. But the fact that the downfall 
of the Bible would mean the break-up of Christendom 
need not trouble us unless we have reason to fear 
that the Bible is likely to fall down. We are accus- 
tomed to speak well of bridges that carry us safely 
over, and to give them the credit of soundness until 
they have been proved rotten. The Bible enjoys an 
established reputation of this sort, has, in fact, so 
good a name, that we need not feel the slightest 



64 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

nervousness or anxiety about going down to the 
bottom of things, and calmly considering the ques- 
tion whether the bare fact that the Bible is a book 
be or be not fatal to the continuance of the religion 
whose book it is. 

To charge Christianity with being a book-religion 
is only another way of condemning it for being of an 
historical character, and having a foothold in the 
past. It is the fond conceit of some that a day is 
coming when religion will be able to dispense with 
documents altogether. Before very long, they hope 
to see the matter in such a shape that a few simple 
propositions, received on their own merits as self- 
evident, and unincumbered by any Avearisome appeal 
to history, will be accepted as an all-sufficient basis 
for the holy life, a trustworthy index of the perfect 
way. Why, they ask contemptuously, should faith be 
compelled to limp along fettered to a huge volume, 
clogged by the weight of ancient chronicles, and bend- 
ing beneath a burden of old prophecies hard to be un- 
derstood ? The remonstrance has a plausible sound, 
and for the moment we feel disposed to yield to it, 
to throw away the parchments as things not worth 
remembering, and to start out with a light heart in 
search of this simple and easy religion of the future. 

But when we sit down quietly to think the whole 
matter over before actually committing ourselves to 
this new departure, slowly it begins to dawn on us 
that a religion which has nothing to tell about the 
past ; which can point to no evidences of the working 



THE ARCHIVES. 65 

of God in history ; affects to be beyond the need of 
way-marks and footprints ; acknowledges no epochs 
of unveiling, no seasons of special vision ; cannot 
say, "There, there, and there He passed, and men 
felt the breath of his presence as He went by,'' — it 
begins to be made plain to us that a religion which 
can do none of these things, but, instead, boasts of 
itself as being wholly without records and quite free 
from such troublesome impedimenta as sacred annals, 
is scarcely a religion we can afford implicitly to trust. 
A God who is " to everlasting " does not suffice us ; 
we would have one who is " from everlasting " also. 
The present is of immense importance, but somehow 
it seems to lose vitality, to become anaemic, when the 
ligaments that tie it to the past have been cut. If 
religion were nothing more or better than theosophy, 
nothing other, that is to say, than an attempt at un- 
derstanding the inner nature of the Divine Being by 
dint of blank contemplation, a patient sitting under 
the fig-tree of pure thought, then, indeed, there might 
be something to say in behalf of this proposal to break 
wholly with the past, and to begin afresh, as it were, 
with a newly-discovered God. But to the mind that 
is in earnest, to the heart aflame with eager interest 
to justify the ways of God to man, such a limiting 
of religion's scope, such a narrowing of her range is 
most distasteful and ominous. We crave evidence 
that God has always " from the beginning " taken an 
interest in the affairs of earth ; that the long story of 
the world's troubles and triumphs has a thread of 

5 



'd6 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

connection running through it ; that the generations 
have been knit together by a tie of purpose ; that 
events are leading the race up to a definite crisis in 
the future, for which the whole past has been a prep- 
aration ; and that the things concerning us men have 
an end. 

This is the meaning of those strong appeals to God 
in which the Christian Scriptures abound, as the God 
of the ancient times and of the former peoples ; faith 
in Him as the God of Abraham is strong, but faith in 
Him as the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob 
is trebly strong. In other words, the argument for 
belief is cumulative, gathering weight and momentum 
as the cycles unfold. Listen to David at one of his 
moments of distress when in the deep waters he is 
grasping after some bit of floating truth, some frag- 
ment of conviction buoyant enough to save him from 
wholly going under, — "0 my God," he cries, " our 
fathers hoped in thee, they trusted in thee, and thou 
didst deliver them." He would have been all at sea 
without the record, the memorandum. 

Listen to Solomon at the dedication of the temple 
gathering up his long supplication into one compre- 
hensive suffrage, — " The Lord our God be with us as 
He was with our fathers ; Let Him not leave us nor 
forsake us." How came it to be possible for the one 
monarch in his calamity, and for the other at his 
supreme hour of triumph, thus to make identically 
the same appeal to Deity as a " God of the fathers " ? 
Clearly because a tradition had been handed on, a 



THE ARCHIVES. 67 

chronicle maintained, a record kept. To enable sup- 
pliants thus to press God with a major premise, to 
urge upon Him old loving-kindnesses as a reason for 
bestowing new ones, there must be a memory that 
can and does reach far back into the past. Experi- 
ence cannot be extemporized. The reach even of a 
lifetime, if it be a disconnected lifetime, is insuffi- 
cient to breed the confidence we hunger after. 

The only trustworthy basis on which to build the 
fabric of hope is memory, and a far-reaching memory 
at that, — "the foundations of many generations." 
A religion tangent to human affairs at only one point 
is inadequate ; we want one that coheres with all the 
past. But such a religion will be from the very neces- 
sities of the case a book-religion. If God be indeed 
a conscious person who " at sundry times and in 
divers manners " has from the beginning been com- 
municating with his creature man, how should we of 
this day be at all the better for that fact unless the 
word spoken and the deed done had been chronicled ? 
But the chronicle, whether it be graven on brass, or 
cut in stone, or written on parchment, or printed on 
paper, is, to all intents and purposes, the Book. 

Moreover, not only are records essential to our 
knowing God ; they are equally essential to our know- 
ing man ; and the knowledge of our fellow-man is no 
slight part of religion. Records help us to know man 
by enlarging the mirror in which we study his re- 
flected image. Nineteenth century man, taken alone, 
is not man, he is a mere fragment of man. If we 



68 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

would know man in his entirety we must study 
him in every ascertainable stage of his existence. 
The cave-dweller whose likeness was opportunely 
scratched for us on a bit of reindeer horn, the Egyp- 
tian whose profile we know from wall paintings as old 
as Thebes, the Assyrian warrior pushing on his char- 
iot of stone and horses of stone against the stone 
enemy he can never overtake, — these people have a 
kinship with us as real as theirs who looked down on 
us from the walls of last year's Salon. 

But, it may be asked, why not prosecute this study 
of man as he shows himself from China to Peru, and 
as he has shown himself from the first day until 
now ; in the pages of the so-called secular historians ? 
Why should Biblical annalists be accounted especially 
valuable in such an undertaking ? Are not a Gibbon 
and a Hallam as helpful as a Moses and an Ezra ? To 
which the proper reply would seem to be. This ought 
ye to have done and not to leave the other undone. 
Doubtless all history is rich in the materials of a true 
anthropology. But the noticeable characteristic of 
the Bible writers is that they, in a unique sense, have 
given us the biography of the human conscience. The 
Greek tragedians can perhaps be said to come near 
them in this line, but it is only with an occasional 
approach. In what we know as " Holy Scripture," 
and in that only of all the literatures of the earth, 
man walks ever either in the approving or the con- 
demning presence of a watchful Judge. In these 
chronicles heaven's verdict is pronounced on every 



THE ARCHIVES. 69 

mortal career with passionless precision. We are not 
deceived by false epithets as in popular histories. 
Jezebel is not named " the Fair," nor Herod styled 
" the Great." The fact that " he did evil in the sight 
of the Lord " constitutes in these pages the condem- 
nation of a king, no matter how much he may have 
added to the national territory or advanced the credit 
of the tribes. Next in importance to the definite 
announcements of fact, to which I have already re- 
ferred as making the true differentia of the Bible, 
ought to be reckoned this pervasive flavor of right- 
eousness. Other sacred books contain in abundance 
what we know as religious sentiment, vague aspira- 
tion, pathetic unrest, the consciousness of insignifi- 
cance, the sense of mystery ; the Bible alone insists on 
knowing, first of all, whether the heart of the devotee 
be set on doing the thing that is right. 

Looked at as the literature of a people the Scrip- 
tures have certainly much in common with other 
literatures. There is poetry there, there is history, 
there is biography, there is mental philosophy, there 
is drama, there is correspondence, there are the pithy 
sayings into which a people 's mind condenses its wise 
conclusions, there is impassioned eloquence, there is 
allegory, there are confessions, there are forecastings 
of the future, there are commentaries upon the past, 
there is a book of laws and there is a book of psalms. 
Kings move across the pages ; soldiers and armies are 
in motion hither and thither, courtiers and nobles, 
laboring men and peasants, women, maidens, children, 



70 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

— all are there, coming and going. Sometimes the 
scene lies in the city, sometimes in the fields, some- 
times the backgromid is of woods and mountains. But 
even so are all great national literatures fashioned. 
Into every one of them enter these component parts. 
Across the field of each marches and countermarches 
the like procession. How then differs the Bible from 
them all ? What is that distinguishing note or mark 
by means of which we distinguish the Book from all 
books beside ? It is the presence throughout the 
Scriptures of what we may call the flavor of right- 
eousness. These sacred writers, as they are properly 
named, all of them look at life and at the earth's vari- 
ous history from a single standpoint ; they are critics 
of conduct ; they not only narrate, they judge. 

It is, indeed, conceivable that men may one day 
rise up and banish religion in every form and shape 
from the earth, sometimes it looks as if they were 
really meaning to do that ; but if religion is to stay 
with us, the Bible, simply by dint of its surpassing 
spiritual vigor, and for lack of any adequate com- 
petitor, is certain to outlii^e all rivals. The ethnic 
scriptures have become easily accessible within recent 
years, they are to be found in English translations on 
the shelves of all well-appointed public libraries, and 
it is possible for anybody to institute on his own ac- 
count such a comparison as I have suggested. Look 
for yourselves into the sacred books of Brahmins, 
Buddhists, and Confucians, and see whether anywhere 
you catch the peculiar quality of voice, at once manda- 



THE ARCHIVES. 71 

tory and persuasive, so easily audible in our own 
Scriptures. Where in them do we find anything 
that strikes home to the conscience with the sturdy 
strength that lives in the arm of Moses, man of God, 
or lies back of the well-aimed blow of Paul, soldier 
and servant of Jesus Christ ? Many bitter things 
have been said about the Bible, first and last, by 
those who have had a grudge against it ; but no one, 
so far as I know, has ever ventured upon calling it a 
weak book. Virility penetrates every page of it ; for 
any slightest trace of feebleness or sentimentality 
we search the Scriptures to no purpose ; it is not 
there. 

To strength add delicacy. The Bible writers are 
not only of stalwart breed, they show everywhere 
what we may call religious refinement, a certain sen- 
sitiveness of retina in the matter of discerning nice 
shades of spiritual difference. Let the student of 
comparative religion match if he can the dignity of 
the Psalms ; the clear-voiced witness of the greater 
and the lesser prophets against the materialism of 
their times ; the lucid simplicity of speech in which 
St. John, the eagle of the Evangelists, tells the story 
of the Word made flesh. 

But most of all, and with carefulest search, let him 
try whether he can find elsewhere anything resem- 
bling the Bible's guarantee of forgiveness and promise 
of eternal life. Here we come back to what I have 
already emphasized as the announcements of Scrip- 
ture. With trifling exceptions, the parables of Na- 



72 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ture make strongly against belief in the forgiveness 
of sins, and are subversive of " the blessed hope of ever- 
lasting life." The Bible, with a voice of authority, 
speaks to us and gives assurance of both pardon and 
immortality. Here is the secret of the book's per- 
petuity ; live it must, because of the good news in it. 
Men's hearts are not so rich in hope that they can 
willingly, or for any long time, shut their ears against 
the only message annunciatory of better things to come 
that has ever yet commanded and held the assent 
of any considerable number of minds acknowledged 
great. 

Do not understand me as wishing to cast the slight- 
est slur upon what is praiseworthy in the sacred 
books of the heathen peoples. In order to prove our 
own Scriptures invaluable, it is not necessary to de- 
clare all other Scriptures valueless. Goodness and 
truth, wherever we find them, and in whatever meas- 
ure, are of God, and whenever we discover their pres- 
ence, we are bound to acknowledge their origin. 
We have St. Paul's warrant for believing that the 
heathen have not been left wholly without witness, 
so far as concerns one of the gravest interests of re- 
ligion, moral responsibility ; and doubtless not a few 
rays of the light which lighteth '^ every man," may 
be found garnered in the Scriptures of faiths other 
than ours. But voluntarily and gratuitously to pro- 
pose to exchange our daylight for their twilight is to 
flatter the heathen overmuch. Our safety does not 
lie in eclecticism. Not by any piecing together of 



THE ARCHIVES. 73 

fragments of religions, not bj picking up a pebble 
here and a pebble there, as artists in mosaic make 
their pictures, are we to find our portraiture of the 
God and Father of us all. No matching of selected 
features gathered from all faiths, however ingeniously 
put together, will ever work a displacement of the 
likeness already accepted by the Christian conscious- 
ness as true, so manifestly does the Bible picture of 
the Divine Majesty surpass all competing attempts to 
show us what God is like. The Christian Evidence 
Societies could do the public no better service than to 
print for purposes of contrast an edition, say, of the 
Gospel of St. John, interleaved with the very best 
sentences it is possible to gather from the sacred lit- 
eratures of the East. The whole controversy would, 
in that case, be condensed into a simple " Look here 
upon this picture, and on this." 

So far as we have as yet developed it, the argument 
may be put into three sentences. First, the world 
cannot live, at least cannot live contentedly, without 
religion. Secondly, religion cannot live, at least can- 
not adequately live, without records, without an 
authenticated history, a book of words and acts. 
Thirdly, among such books, and they are many, the 
Christian Scriptures, even by the confession of un- 
friendly critics, stand supreme. 

I pass now to consider the function of criticism 
with respect to the Scriptures, and the construction 
that ought to be put upon the words Inspiration and 
Revelation. It is obvious to remark that without 



74 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

what we understand by criticism we never should 
have had the Bible in its present shape at all. Criti- 
cism is the exercise of discernment ; as an instrument 
it may be likened to the flail. The critic essays to 
separate the more from the less precious, and to tell 
us why he does so. In some instances criticism is 
the work of an individual, sometimes of a delibera- 
tive body supposed to be composed of qualified 
judges ; and sometimes, again, it is the slow action 
of a public opinion that makes itself heard in only 
half articulate ways, and at odd intervals, but still 
does, sooner or later, carry its point and hold the 
field. 

Beginners in theology are apt to be very much 
disturbed in mind because nobody can give them a 
hard and fast account of the precise manner in which 
the canon of the Old Testament and the canon of the 
New were originally determined. The instinct in us 
that craves precision is piqued when it is discovered 
that, in an important inquiry, day and date are miss- 
ing. It is well known that in the early Church there 
were differences of opinion with respect to the limits 
of the canon. There were certain books universally 
received ; there were certain others open to challenge. 
In some congregations lessons were read from the 
Shepherd of Hermas, for example, a Scripture with 
which at present only patristic students are familiar. 
How was it ever brought to pass that there did finally 
emerge the collection we now have as the New Tes- 
tament? An intelligent believer will be likely to 



THE ARCHIVES. 75 

answer the question thus, The result was brought to 
pass under the oversight of Almighty God by the 
instrumentality of criticism. 

The criticism was doubtless exercised by all three 
of the methods I just named. Solitary scholars, each 
man working by himself, had part in it ; councils of 
bishops had part in it ; public opinion, declaring itself 
in all sorts of unclassified ways, had part in it. Fin- 
ally, as the result of the best judgment of the times 
there came forth the collection as we have it ; the 
canon, as we say, was closed. A not wholly dissimi- 
lar process gave us, in the region of secular literature, 
what we know as " the classics." It is impossible to 
say precisely who assorted the ancient authors, and 
decided just which should be and which should not be 
accounted classical. All the same we have the clas- 
sics ; that they exist is an unquestionable fact ; no 
one can shut his eyes to their presence in literature ; 
they are here. Moreover, the fact is one that is not 
at all imperilled by the confessed possibility of error 
on the part of those who originally determined the 
metes and bounds of classicality. Because the right 
of this or that obscure poet of post-Augustan times 
to a place among the Latin classics may happen to be 
disputed, no one trembles for Catullus or for Virgil. 
The Amen of many generations has given sanction to 
the list as a whole, and though modern criticism 
may nibble at the edges of the codex, the substance 
remains. 

We ought to be equally confident with respect to 



76 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

the classics of religion, the Scriptures of the Old and 
New Testaments. Through aid of criticism they were 
originally marked off from other Scriptures, and iso- 
lated as having in them a certain distinctive some- 
thing not elsewhere to be found. If criticism did us 
this good service some seventeen or eighteen hundred 
years ago, why look askance at criticism when it 
comes in. nineteenth century guise proposing to re- 
open questions of authorship and canonicity in con- 
nection with our sacred books ? It may be urged 
against this way of looking at the matter that since 
it has pleased God to shroud the beginnings of many 
beneficent growths, that of the State, for instance, in 
darkness, a reverent prudence would discountenance 
any attempt to investigate the beginnings of the Bible. 
The remonstrance has a certain measure of reason- 
ableness in it, and deserves a hearing ; to sneer at it 
as childish is more easy than wise. Doubtless it is, in 
a sense, calamitous for society when the analytical 
fit seizes it, and all life comes to be written over 
with interrogation marks. There is a sickly as well as 
a healthy curiosity, and that is by no means the best 
horticulture which is for ever bent on pulling things 
up by the roots with the professed object of seeing 
how they began. On the compiler of every document 
that in any measure is expected to bind posterity, be 
it constitution, code, or canon, a specially solemn re- 
sponsibility rests of doing what is to be done in such 
a workmanlike manner that there will be slight need 
of revision. Particularly in matters that touch the 



THE ARCHIVES. 77 

conscience is it desirable that the presumption should 
be as strong as possible ' in favor of things as they 
are, and against the needless re-investigation of origins. 
It is better to keep the Ten Commandments as they 
stand, than to become so deeply versed in the methods 
of ethics as to be doubtful whether the keeping them 
or the breaking them makes very much difference in 
the end. 

But while all this is true, it is equally indisputable 
that occasions do arise when the reinvestigation of 
beginnings is imperative. A man whose house is on 
the river's bank may live in it for years without a 
moment's uneasiness ; but if by and by his neighbors 
come to him, one after another, with the alarming 
statement that the current is wearing away his foun- 
dations, he is a fool if he refuses to allow an expert 
to investigate the matter. He may personally feel 
very sure that the neighbors are mistaken, and that 
no real danger threatens ; nevertheless, if it be only 
to set the mind of the community at rest, and to 
quiet the clamor, he will do well not merely to allow 
but to encourage investigation. The principle holds 
good not of houses only but of treasures of all sorts ; 
tlie owners of family diamonds who are afraid to sub- 
mit them to the judgment of the lapidary, the coiner 
who shrinks from letting the sharp acid touch his 
gold, are persons of doubtful wealth. There is a cer- 
tain holy intrepidity which thorough-going believers 
are bound to cultivate. If the Bible have in it, as 
Christians hold, an authentic message from heaven to 



78 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

earth, there is no corrosive known to scholarship that 
can eat away the substance of it. When our Lord 
Jesus Christ said " Search the Scriptures," he gave 
biblical criticism its everlasting warrant. 

The practical question, therefore, is this : Are pres- 
ent circumstances such as make a reinvestigation of 
the whole matter desirable ? A great company of 
thoughtful and not undevout people are saying Yes ; 
and whether they are right or wrong, more harm is 
likely to come of trying to prevent their having their 
way, than can possibly accrue from cordially letting 
them have it, and starting them with a Bon voyage. 
It is impossible that the friends of God should really 
have anything to fear from what an honest scholar- 
ship may attempt ; and that man, I do not hesitate to 
affirm, who happens to be to-day the one who is doing 
the most to throw white light upon the things written 
in the Bible has better right than any other living to 
be entitled Defender of the Faith. 

A little more than fifty years ago, Arnold of Rugby 
predicted the crisis in the midst of which we find 
ourselves. " Have you seen," he wrote to his friend 
Mr. Justice Coleridge, " your uncle's ' Letters on In- 
spiration,' which I believe are to be published ? They 
are well fitted to break ground in the approaches to 
that momentous question which involves in it so great 
a shock to existing notions ; the greatest, probably, 
that has ever been given since the discovery of the 
falsehood of the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility. 
Yet it must come ; and will end, in spite of the fears 



THE ARCHIVES. 79 

and clamors of the weak and bigoted, in the higher 
exalting and more sure establishing of Christian 
truth." 

So spoke a true prophet, little dreaming of the 
parts a son and a granddaughter of his own were 
destined to play in the commotion he foresaw. 

The " existing notions " to which Arnold referred 
were doubtless such as had to do with the nature and 
methods of inspiration. That the words of Scripture 
had been actually dictated, syllable by syllable, to the 
writers of the several books by a voice from without 
themselves ; that for the purposes of composition 
evangelists and apostles had been, to use the cant of 
spiritualism, simply " trance mediums," unconscious 
of what they did, — this was the notion upon which 
the disciple of Niebuhr and the friend of Whately felt 
sure that doom had been pronounced. No one whose 
eyes are open to the movements of contemporary 
thought can fail to see that the revolution predicted 
is in progress. It is no longer held or taught by in- 
telligent theologians anywhere that the writers of the 
books of the Bible were mere amanuenses, no more 
personally accountable for their words than the autom- 
aton chess-player for his moves. On the contrary, 
these authors are acknowledged to have been such in 
the proper sense of the word. They are spoken of 
as compilers ; they are compared one with another in 
respect to the facilities they severally enjoyed for 
gathering accurate information ; each is recognized 
as having his own proper literary style, and, in mat- 



80 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ters where temper and spirit come in, his own per- 
sonal equation. 

But because our estimate of the scope and manner 
of inspiration has been modified, does it follow that 
our faith in the Bible as a bona fide message from 
God must suffer sliipwreck ? By no means. When 
we think of it we see that it is impossible for any 
book, no matter how sacred, to be inspired. Only 
that which has life can breathe, and breath enters 
into the very definition of inspiration. It is men who 
are inspired, not books ; prophets and saints who 
breathe in the truth of God, not the papyrus or the 
wax which serve them as their instruments of trans- 
mission. The familiar phrase " the inspiration of 
the Bible " must, therefore, in order to become intel- 
ligible, be expanded into the inspiration of the men 
who wrote the Bible. The evidence that the men 
who wrote the Bible were, as a matter of fact, 
breathed into by Almighty God in such a way as 
to give to what they wrote a value wholly unique, 
is to be sought for in the characteristics of the book 
taken as a whole, and in the history of what it has 
done for the peoples which have accepted it as trust- 
worthy. 

Of the characteristics of the Bible over and above 
those that have been already emphasized, by far the 
most striking is its unity. The book is symmetri- 
cal and self-consistent to a wonderful degree. I am 
aware that symmetry is sometimes an accidental pro- 
duct. If I throw a thousand handfuls of sand succes- 



THE ARCHIVES. 81 

sivelj upon the floor, it may happen in one instance 
out of the thousand that the particles will be found 
arranged in such a manner as to suggest a set pat- 
tern. But the impression produced on the mind by 
this result is very different from that which follows 
from seeing the grains of sand sprinkled over the 
surface of a metallic disk arrange themselves in a 
particular geometrical shape in response to the par- 
ticular note of sound that has set the disk to vibrat- 
ing. In this instance we recognize a symmetry 
intentionally brought to pass by the experimentalist, 
who knew before striking the note just wiiat result 
would follow. I do not assert that the evidence of 
unity of plan afforded by the symmetry of the Bible, 
is such as to be overwhelriiingly demonstrative. I do 
say that to many minds it has commended itself as 
singularly persuasive. 

Had the Scriptures all of them been written within 
a year or within ten years, or even within a single gen- 
eration, there would be nothing wonderful about their 
possessing unity of plan. In the case of a book like 
the Koran the wonder is that it has not more sym- 
metry than it has. But we are to remember that in 
the case of the Bible, the dates of the authorship of 
the various parts differ by centuries, and we must 
reckon at least sixteen hundred years to get the span 
of the whole arch. 

Clearly the most reasonable hypothesis upon which 
to account for the Bible's symmetry, granting that it 
exists, is the supposition of an extraneous guidance 



82 THE PEACE OP THE CHURCH. 

that moved the authors in such manner, and with 
such force, as to make all of them co-operant to a 
common end. For such providential guidance, sup- 
plied from above, there can be no better name than 
inspiration, — that inbreathing of a more enlightened 
spirit than man's own, whereby he is enabled to 
*' think those things that are good." 

But more to the point by far than " inspiration " is 
the allied word " revelation." What we really want 
to know is whether the Bible writers do actually un- 
veil to us certain facts of grave moment which we 
could never know but for such help. The matters to 
which I refer are such as these, the personality of 
God, the pre-existence of Jesus Christ, man's survival 
of death, the prospect of an ultimate restitution 
of all things, the reality of heaven, the j^eality of 
hell ; these are points with respect to which centuries 
of philosophizing can help us not one whit. If such 
truths, supposing them to be truths, are to be known 
at all, they must become known by a drawing aside 
of the curtain ; no otherwise is it conceivable that we 
should become aware of them. The study of Nature 
and of the human mind may furnish illustrations, and 
what may even be charitably construed as corroborative 
evidence, of the matters thus disclosed ; but to disclose 
them it is powerless. The logical mind is shut up to 
a choice between Pyrrhonism and revelation. 

The advantage gained by shifting the burden of 
argument from inspiration to revelation is further evi- 
dent when we consider that inspiration is a thing of 



THE ARCHIVES. 83 

degrees, a matter of more and less, whereas, with re- 
spect to revelation all w^e have to ask is. Has it or has it 
not occurred ? There is a sense of the word in which 
inspiration is credited to all men who accomplish 
more than the common. Bezaleel is said in the Book 
of Exodus to have been filled with the Spirit of God 
" to work in gold and in silver and in brass, and 
in cutting of stones to set them, and in carving of 
timber." This is a definition of inspiration large 
enough to cover the case of Leonardo da Yinci, the 
Bezaleel of the Renaissance So then, if Christians 
confine themselves to a claim of " inspiration " for 
the authors of Scripture, they may find men putting 
the Bible on the same shelf with other sacred books, 
wedging it in between Plato and Confucius, and quite 
content to claim for Isaiah and St. Paul only such 
a measure of the Spirit as they are willing to concede 
to Dante, Bunyan, and a-Kempis. A revelation, on 
the other hand, does not admit of degrees. Either it 
has been made or it has not been made ; either the 
heavens have been opened and God has showed us the 
truth, or they are brass over our head for ever. 

To a mind studying the Bible from the point of 
approach now indicated, many of the so-called diffi- 
culties of faith shrink into insignificance. The in- 
timation, for example, of little inaccuracies in the 
record, whether of an historical, a geographical, or a 
scientific sort, cease to alarm. Are the great struc- 
tural lines of the whole fabric right and true ? is the 
real question. Because I accept the erratum of some 



84 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

chronologist who has discovered a wrong date in the 
Books of Chronicles, it does not follow that I am logi- 
cally bound to welcome with open arms a whole troop 
of interpreters who are bent on writing the Resurrec- 
tion down a myth, and distilling the personality of 
God into a figure of speech. Let every proposition be 
tried on its own merits, and, above all, let us distin- 
guish magnitudes. We are never really the poorer 
for having been told the truth ; but we are sometimes 
frightened into taking for true, statements contradic- 
tory to cherished beliefs, when really it is the new 
announcement rather than the old faith that lacks 
verification. We do not the less enjoy the glories 
of the sunset because it has been discovered that 
the going down of the sun means really the backing 
around of the earth ; but every now and then credulous 
people are thrown into a paroxysm of alarm by some 
pseudo-scientific announcement that a great cosmic 
disturbance is impending. There is a difference in 
the two cases. In like manner, if I am asked to give 
up the Bible as the Word of God because Solomon, 
reputed the wisest of men and inspired, was cer- 
tainly mistaken when he spoke of the clouds as 
dropping down the dew, and probably mistaken in 
what he said about the habits of ants, I decline to be 
so foolish as to let my heart fail me on any such 
grounds. My confidence in the Bible as an authentic 
unfolding of the truth, the will, and the purposes of 
God has anchorage deeper down. 

The simple fact of the matter is this ; modern re- 



THE ARCHIVES. 85 

searcli* is modifying, — some say revolutionizing, but 
it is more accurate to say modifying, old opinions as 
to the process by which the various books of the 
Bible were brought into their present combination, 
and made into the volume as we have it now. Mod- 
ern research, be it also observed, is doing what it is 
doing after a fashion not unlike that in which Sedg- 
wick, Murchison, and Lyell changed our old concep- 
tions of the manner in which the globe was brought 
to be what to-day it is. But the earth itself is pre- 
cisely what it was before the geologists began to 
investigate, and the book we know as the Bible is 
precisely what it was before the critics began to criti- 
cise. And just as there are those of us who while 
thankfully accepting all that Geology can really prove 
with respect to the formation of the earth's crust, 
nevertheless hold fast the old-fashioned faith which 
expresses itself in the words, " I believe in God, the 
Father Almighty, Maker ; " so there are those of us, 
and their number is reckoned by tens of thousands, 
who while ready cheerfully to concede whatever the 
best critical scholarship may be able to establish 
regarding the formation of the Scriptures as an his- 
torical process, are not at all shaken in their 
confidence that as the record of God's revelation of 
Himself, the Bible, substantially as we have it now, 
will stand to the end of time. 

What I mean is that the man must be either of a 
singularly sanguine temperament, or else strangely 
forgetful of the oscillations of scholarship in the past, 



86 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

who fancies that the books of the Bible will ever be, 
by general consent, redistributed and renamed to suit 
the conclusions of contemporary criticism. All sorts 
of theories may, from time to time, be set afloat as to 
the proper chronological order of the volume's compo- 
nent parts, and these theories may make converts 
many and distinguished, but the volume itself will 
continue, as at present, to begin with the book called 
Genesis and to end with the book called Revelation. 
To the eye of criticism Jehovist and Elohist may grow 
to seem more distinctly separable than ever, but like 
flies in amber the two will continue to maintain their 
twin existence in the narrative as at this day. It is 
unlikely, in other words, that any scheme for remod- 
elling the whole structure of the Bible will ever get 
beyond the academic stage. The thing may be dis- 
cussed and urged, but the moment action becomes 
imminent a still more recent scholarship will step 
in to aflirm that, if change there is to be, it should 
proceed on lines different from those proposed. In 
saying this I am not charging scholarship with fickle- 
ness, I am merely calling attention to the fact that in 
the field of Biblical science absolute demonstration is 
unattainable, and to the probability that since such is 
the case, no one hypothesis will ever so effectually 
distance all the others that the maintainers of it will 
be allowed to reconstruct the canon at their pleasure. 
The argument against the authenticity of 11. Peter, for 
example, and the argument in favor of the multiple 
authorship of Isaiah may both of them become in the 



THE ARCHIVES. 87 

future very much stronger than they are to-day, but 
it is in the highest degree unhkely that such a com- 
plete consensus of critical opinion will ultimately be 
secured as to warrant, say, the Syndics of the Univer- 
sity Press in dropping the one book and in subdivid- 
ing the other. 

Not only so, but when it comes to fretting our- 
selves over the detection of petty errors and faults in 
the text of Scripture, we shall do well to re-read our 
Butler, and having got ourselves thoroughly into the 
spirit of the Analogy to make note of the singular 
fact that none of the creations of God as we observe 
them in the outer world are perfect, according to our 
human conceptions and definitions of perfectness. Of 
man it has been truly said, 

" The type of perfect in his mind 
In Nature can he nowhere find." 

Why stumble then at discovering in the Book of 
Revelation a characteristic equally discernible in the 
Book of Nature, supposing the two books to have had 
one and the same author ? Who, for instance, ever 
saw an absolutely flawless petal on a stem ? But do 
we, for that reason, doubt God's having made the 
roses ? A draughtsman with a pencil and a ruler 
can, in a few moments, plot for us on paper an out- 
line of the perfect hexagonal prism which is the ideal 
form of a quartz crystal, — the form in which, as we say 
(greatly presuming in saying so), that quartz "ought" 
to crystallize. But we may search the quarries and 



88 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

grottoes of the world in vain for any bit of actual 
quartz that shall conform absolutely and without the 
slightest deviation to the draughtsman's pattern. Are 
we to assume for this reason that the draughts- 
man has a better mind than God ? or account the 
hand which can draw so easily the lines of an ideal 
crystal defter than the Hand which has been shaping 
the real crystal through uncounted ages ? Not if we 
have weighed well the purport of that ancient chal- 
lenge, — " He that made the eye, shall He not see ? " 
Scarcely enougli seems to have been made of this 
particular argument from analogy in recent apolo- 
getics. For if we find what look to our eye blemishes 
in workmanship which we know to be wholly God's, 
such as tlie flowers and the rocks, ought we to be 
troubled at discovering the like signs and tokens to 
be characteristic of a book in the making of which 
God may be said to have taken man into partnership ? 
Why not have the good sense to look at the Bible 
as we look at everything else that has been subject to 
the necessary conditions of life and growth, and not 
let the knees of our faith knock together in alarm the 
moment this or that student of the text points out 
to us some fleck or flaw, as he is pleased to think it, 
in the workmanship of Almighty God ? Some lynx- 
eyed Old Testament critic assures me, with the air 
of a Samson pulling down the temple, that he has 
discovered a discrepancy between a certain statement 
in the Book of Leviticus and a certain other state- 
ment in the Book of Deuteronomy, 



THE ARCHIVES. 89 

First of all, I ask him whether he is quite sure that 
he is right ; but even when convinced that his dis- 
covery is genuine, 1 decline to feel as seriously con- 
cerned over it as he would like to have me feel. If 
God has seen fit to inject his revelation into the 
midst of human affairs, I am not surprised to find 
the history of it subject to the same disabilities that 
attach to ordinary history. " I adore," says Athen- 
agoras, " the Being who harmonized the strains and 
leads the melody, not the instrument which he plays. 
What umpires at the games, omitting to crown the 
minstrel, place the garland upon the lyre." 

The Bible, as we know it to-day, is an accomplished 
fact, and what it is it is. It stands out before us like 
a great tree that has attained its growth. As such it 
has a complete contour of its own, and we might as 
well attempt to kill a tree by criticism as hope to 
make away with the Bible by philosophizing on the 
method and order of its growth. On a sunny slope 
in an English nobleman's park, flourishing far away 
from the country and climate of its birth, we find a 
stately, heavy-foliaged cedar, one of those great '' trees 
of the Lord " of which the Psalmists tell, the pride of 
Lebanon. English soil of itself never could have pro- 
duced the tree ; the land in which it first had root 
and from which it was transplanted is the land of 
Palestine, the land called " Holy." But is it here and 
now any tlie less the cedar, any the less " tree of Je- 
hovah " on that account ? Does the fact of its being 
an exotic destroy its beauty or its value ? No, it is as 



90 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

much a tree of God's planting in England as ever 
it could have been in Syria. We notice, here and 
there upon the trunk, gnarled spots that tell of an 
irregular growth, and betray some past departure 
from the normal movement of the juices within. 
Is it the less a cedar, the less worthy to be called God's 
tree for that reason ? At the extremity of one of the 
limbs there happens to be a dead branch ; it suggests 
curious thoughts. Why did that particular branch 
wither ? All the adjoining foliage is quick and beau- 
tiful and fresh as ever ; why should that one outer- 
most shred of the tree's vesture thus have shrivelled ? 
Did disease attack it from within, or has some blight 
struck it from without ? We cannot tell ; we are as 
much perplexed as we were by the flaws on the rough 
surface of the bark. But what of that ? Do we for 
a moment distrust the venerable cedar, question its 
genuineness, deny its authenticity ? No ; we look at 
it with reverent awe ; we glory in it just as it is ; 
we say, — Truly it is the Lord's tree, all the marks of 
his undoubted workmanship are here ; it is Jeho- 
vah's cedar ; He made it. Under the shadow of the 
branches I will lay me down and take my rest." 

Our answer then to the question, How ought men in 
these times to think about the Bible ? so far as the 
positive side of the Anglican statement is concerned, 
should be this. We ought to account the Bible to be 
the permanent hand-book of authentic religion, — a 
hand-book open always to new and larger interpreta- 
tions as fast as hiiman knowledge widens, a hancj-book 



THE ARCHIVES. 91 

which scholars must be permitted to criticise and re- 
edit with the same absolute freedom with which they 
criticise and re-edit the text of the secular classics, 
but a hand-book destined to continue substantially 
what it is to-day until the end of the age, still, as of 
old, the Word of God to man. 

But before this question of the Scriptures is wholly 
left behind, something ought to be said with reference 
to the alleged insufficiency of the Bible as a repository 
of religious truth. Attention has thus far been en- 
grossed with the arguments of the left, but what the 
Bishops have to say upon this subject is also open to 
attack from the extreme right. Roman Catholics take 
the ground that the Scriptures unsupplemented by 
something more are inadequate, that they are good as 
far as they go, but that they do not go far enough. 

This theory of a duplex revelation has been suc- 
cinctly stated thus : " Every sort of doctrine which is 
to be delivered to the faithful is contained in the Word 
of God, which is divided into Scripture and Tradition." ^ 
That tradition has been by most Protestant contro- 
versialists greatly undervalued, is doubtless true. In 
matters secular we could ill afford to spare knowledge 
that has come down to us in all sorts of informal and 
irregular and unauthenticated ways. Even so precise 
a thing as statute law demands of its interpreter some 
acquaintance with old uses and time-worn consent, 
with the things that " go without saying." We should 
consider the historian foolish who based his account 
1 Catechism of Council of Trent, Preface, Qu. xii. 



92 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

of a people's beginnings wholly upon folk-lore, with the 
expectation of having what he wrote considered trust- 
worthy, but on the other hand to rule out the folk-lore 
altogether would be almost as great a folly. It would 
be unsafe to assume, for instance, that the Arthurian 
legend had no grain of truth in it ; and though the hero 
of the Robin Hood ballads may never have existed, the 
ballads themselves certainly throw light on the man- 
ners and customs, the popular loves and hatreds of 
Norman England. 

If the Roman Catholic would be content to treat 
tradition as illustrative, and not insist on our re- 
ceiving it as demonstrative, we should have no quar- 
rel with him. The Church of England avails itself of 
tradition as a side-light when in the preface to its 
Ordinal it calls in '' ancient authors " to buttress by 
their testimony the Scriptural argument for Episco- 
pacy. Most Anglicans are also glad to take up with 
such help as tradition has to give in the matter of infant 
baptism, and the transference of the Sabbatical sanc- 
tion from the last to the first day of the week. And 
yet, on the other hand, it ought carefully to be observed 
that the Church of England has nowhere given to any 
one of these contentions the dignity of an article of 
the faith. The statement, " The baptism of young 
children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, 
as most agreeable with the institution of Christ," ^ is 
not put upon a level with the statement, " The third 
day He rose again from the dead." 
1 Article xxvii. 



THE ARCHIVES. 93 

Acceptance of the belief that " from the Apostles' 
time there have been these orders of ministers in 
Christ's Church, Bishops, Priests, and Deacons," 
is not made a prerequisite to receiving the Holy 
Communion. Only to such propositions as she has 
held, whether rightly or wrongly, to be demonstrably 
scriptural, has the Church of England ever demanded 
the assent of all her children.^ 

The necessity of taking this rigid attitude towards 
tradition, if a religion is to be kept pure, is occa- 
sioned by the fecundity that inheres in tradition by 
the very nature of the thing. The Bible piques as 
well as gratifies our curiosity. To one question that 
it answers, it raises a dozen which it leaves unan- 
swered. The curious mind of man cannot let these 
unsolved problems alone ; in fact, they are all the 
more fascinating for having been left unsolved. The 
interest in the Sibylline books that were bought must 
have been as nothing compared with the longing 
desire to know what had been on the pages of the 
burned volumes. And as demand creates supply, 
so is there great danger that in proportion to the 
weight with which the silence of Scripture presses 
on the mind, will be the effort of self-evolving tra- 
dition to make good the deficiency. This has to be 
acknowledged on all hands in the case of the elder 
revelation. We have it upon the authority of Christ 
Himself, that in his day the Word of God had been 
'^made of none effect," stifled. He seems to have 
^ Article viii. 



94 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

meant, by the traditions. It is the old story of the 
sleeping beauty in the wood. He who comes to seek 
must cut his way through " bur and brake and briar," 
before he finds himself even at the door of the en- 
chanted palace. 

A clever Mohammedan writer ^ has lately told us 
that the same thing holds good of Islam. 

"You read the Koran," he says, '' and you think you 
know Islamism. That is a great mistake. . . . Besides 
the Koran, there are traditions which are as powerful and 
even more respected than the Koran itself. It is difficult 
for a European to know these traditions. The whole 
science of Asia, everything which is good or useful, has 
been attributed to Islam. It is an ocean where you can 
find everything which is good to be known ; and it offers 
all kinds of facilities, not in the Koran alone, but in the 
traditions, for the progress of the people." 

This liability to overgrowth which neither Judaism 
nor Islam has been able to escape, attaches to Chris- 
tianity as well. Nor need the liability be greatly 
deprecated or deplored so long as the traditions 
pass for what they are worth and for no more. It 
is only through gross carelessness on the part of cus- 
todians, that the ivy and the lichen ever become the 
destroyers of the masonry they adorn. There is a 
great deal that is beautiful in the life of the Church 
for which it would be difficult to find explicit Scrip- 
ture warrant. It was narrow of the Puritans to think 
^ Prince Malcolm Khan. 



THE ARCHIVES. 95 

that no names were good enough for Christian chil- 
dren but Bible names ; and it is silly of the ultra- 
Protestant of our own day to demand a " proof text " 
for every pious usage that former generations have 
handed on. But it is neither narrow nor silly to in- 
sist that when it comes to the ascertainment of the 
essentials of our religion, regard shall be had only 
to what stands unmistakably on record. Text and 
margin are separable things, and should be kept 
apart. 



III. 

THE CREDENDA, 



The older I grew, the smaller stress I laid on those controversies and 
curiosities (though still my intellect abhorreth confusion), as finding greater 
uncertainties in them than I at first discovered, and finding less usefulness 
where there is the greatest certainty. The Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and 
the Ten Commandments are now to me as my daily bread and drink, and as 
I can speak and write over them again and again, so I had rather read and 
hear of them than of any of the school niceties. And this I observed also 
with Richard Hooker and with man}' other men. — Richard Baxter. 

I have found in this way the preciousness of the simple creeds of an- 
tiquity, tlie inward witness which a Gospel of facts possesses, and which a 
Gospel of notions must always want; how the most awful and absolute 
truths, which notions displace or obscure, are involved in facts and through 
facts, may be entertained and embraced by those who do not possess the 
faculty of comparing notions, and have a blessed incapacity of resting in 
them. — F. D. Maurice. 

No sober-minded man will hold an opinion against reason, no Christian 
against Scripture, no lover of peace against the Church. — St. Augustine. 



III. 

THE CREDENDA. 

No memorandum of the first principles of Church 
Unity is complete that leaves dogma wholly out 
of the account. Men cannot act in concert without 
credenda^ and since Christianity, looked at as a great 
movement for the betterment of human life, of neces- 
sity demands concert of action, of necessity also cre- 
denda it must have. AAvare of this, the Bishops at 
Lambeth assembled set forth, under the head of dogma, 
" The Apostles' Greedy as the Baptismal Symbol ; and 
the Nicene Greedy as the sufficient statement of the 
Christian Faiths 

We shall be the better able to appreciate the 
strength of this position if, first of all, some thought 
be given to the manner in which dogma, as such, 
stands related to religion. It may be objected that 
this is a question for the schools, and for the schools 
only ; but the days of the discipline of the secret are 
ended. Theology can no longer rest content with 
sitting, in pillared seclusion, far away from the com- 
mon resorts of men. The other sciences have quitted 
their academic retirement and have come out into the 
open. Queen of them though she be, Theology has 



100 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

no choice but to do as they have done, or run the risk 
of being thought to have abdicated her sovereignty. 
In these democratic days queens who are only such m 
posse make a poor showing. I venture therefore upon 
a definition, and ask you to think of a dogma as a 
statement set forth, either by an individual teacher or 
by some teaching body, to be taken for true, while 
confessedly not susceptible of logical demonstration. 

It is evident that, as thus defined, dogmas are by 
no means the exclusive possession of the Christian 
Church. Pure science employs dogma very sparingly, 
but the mixed sciences are tolerant of it in large 
measure. Geometry, for example, a pure science, 
makes use of dogma under the name of the " postu- 
late ; " the postulate being an unproved assertion, the 
taking of which for granted facilitates the proof of 
other things, and thus by a sort of retroaction jus- 
tifies itself. Nevertheless, Geometry, as a rule, is 
shy of dogma, and deals for the most part with what 
is directly provable. Not so Biology, and the mixed 
sciences in general ; — here dogma abounds, com- 
monly veiled under the name of "working hypothe- 
sis." The so-called " law " of natural selection is an 
instance in point. No one alleges that natural selec- 
tion has been demonstrated, or is demonstrable ; 
nevertheless, it is taught, and taught with much posi- 
tiveness, by those who hold it. In fact, to question 
this particular working hypothesis brings down upon 
the questioner in some quarters censure as sharp, if 
not as heavy, as that which in old times fell to the lot 



THE CREDENDA. 101 

of those who disparaged the dogmas of the Church. 
Politics also and Sociology are full of dogma. The 
proposition " Universal suffrage makes for the good 
of a free people " is a dogma. The nation to which 
we belong sets it forth as a thing to be believed, al- 
though nobody pretends that it is susceptible of proof. 
It is an American dogma. The different schools of 
medicine again set forth dogma almost without stint. 
There is, for example, the antiseptic dogma, and over 
against it the aseptic ; the very fact of the co-exist- 
ence of the two dogmas being of itself evidence that 
neither the antiseptic nor the aseptic hypothesis ad- 
mits of absolute proof. Should proof be ultimately 
forthcoming, the dogma that triumphed would thence- 
forth cease to be dogma, having become transmuted 
into verified fact. Meanwhile, nevertheless, the sur- 
geons, whether of the antiseptic or the aseptic way of 
thinking, do not scruple to go on practising in accord- 
ance with that one of the two dogmatic bases to 
which they the more incline. 

But if the thing itself be so obvious a necessity of 
human thought and life, how, one may very naturally 
ask, has the name for the thing come to incur the 
odium which, as all must own, attaches to it ? 

An easy way of answering the question would be to 
attribute the unpopularity of religious dogma directly 
to the hardness of men's hearts, to their obstinate 
determination to stay in the dark when the choice of 
walking in the light is offered them. But of the most 
intensely dogmatic teacher that ever trod the earth, 



102 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

it is written that " the common people heard Him 
gladly." He taught as one having authority, that is 
to say, dogmatically, and the multitude followed Him 
all the more gladly on that account. It is there- 
fore only reasonable to suppose that some portion at 
least of the disfavor in which dogma has come to be 
held is a deserved disfavor, the unpopularity an un- 
popularity merited and earned. 

We shall be strengthened in this conviction if we 
consider two or three of the ways in which the prin- 
ciple of dogma has been abused, wounded in the 
house of its friends. There has been, for instance, a 
strong disposition always, on the part of opinionated 
men, to set forth their own private notions upon all 
sorts of subjects, as if, instead of being notions, they 
were decrees. A dogma, like a projectile, has mo- 
mentum in proportion to the amount and strength of 
the explosive back of it. When a toy pistol is fired 
off with all the pomp and circumstance that usually 
attend the discharge of a three-hundred pounder, the 
lookers-on smile, they cannot help it. The dogmatist 
in this way does dogma moi^e harm in a sentence 
than he can undo in a volume ; for the thought of 
authority enters into all our conceptions of dogma, 
and for a personal utterance to carry authority the 
man who makes it must convince us either that he is 
inspired of some intelligence higher than the human, 
or that he is an expert in the department in which 
he undertakes to instruct us, or else that he is the 
mouth-piece of a very considerable number of con- 



THE CREDENDA. 103 

senting minds. Whoever ventures dogmatically to 
address us simply in his capacity of brother-man 
makes himself ridiculous, and does what he can to 
make dogma as such ridiculous also. 

But not only have individuals brought discredit 
upon dogma by their misuse of the dogmatic method, 
churches are in the same condemnation. Under the 
somewhat misleading even though pleasantly allit- 
erative title of The Creeds of Christendom^ a living 
divine has brought together dogmatic utterances, Ro- 
man and Reformed, numerous enough to fill three 
massive volumes. The compilation has proved a most 
valuable help to the student ; but when it is considered 
that the New Testament, the fountain-head of Chris- 
tian doctrine, is commonly printed in one volume, and 
a small volume at that, it becomes evident that the 
makers of the Confessions have very considerably 
overdone their work. Yes, it must be frankly ac- 
knowledged that for no inconsiderable measure of the 
unpopularity of dogma the teachers of religion have 
been themselves to blame. They have tried to make 
men believe too much. Really it has been against 
the multiplicity of dogmas, rather than against the 
dogmatic principle itself, that opposition has knidled 
into flame. In order to form a just judgment in the 
matter we must learn carefully to distinguish between 
essential dogma, — those statements, that is to say, 
which make the essence of Christian belief, — and the 
many other propositions which from time to time 
have been set forth as logical inferences from these 



104 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

first-hand truths. When a living poet, in a stanza 
which has become hackneyed quite as much through 
misuse as through right use, speaks of our " little 
systems " having their day and ceasing to be, it is 
not, we may be very sure, the articles of the Creed he 
has in mind, but rather those complicated frame- 
works of theological opinion which under the name 
of platforms, confessions, and bodies of divinity have 
been again and again clamped and riveted together, 
only to fall in pieces as soon as there has been time 
enough for the corrosive influences of the atmosphere 
to eat away the bolts. 

But the chief ground of complaint against Christian 
dogma is of another sort. I have been making allow- 
ance for what is justifiable in the unpopularity under 
which the word labors ; let us now look at what is 
unjustifiable in it. Men mislike Christian dogma be- 
cause of its unchangeableness, its fixity. The politi- 
cians have their dogmas, as we have seen ; but then 
they alter them to meet fresh emergencies, and re- 
make the platform as occasion may require. With 
the philosophers and the naturalists there is the same 
readiness to allow for revision. Our dogmas, say the 
metaphysicians, we are at any moment willing to 
throw into solution that they may crystallize afresh. 
And ours, chime in the naturalists, are only acknowl- 
edged stepping-stones to higher and larger and firmer 
ground ; we can, and if occasion arises, we shall re- 
vise them to-morrow. But the Church keeps on say- 
ing the same thing. She alone among the teaching 



THE CREDENDA. 105 

voices to which man is asked to listen has nothing 
new to tell. Her dogma, like the Medo-Persian law, 
altereth not, and that is why we weary of it and wish 
it out of the way. 

Here again the Church has a reason to give, and a 
sound one, as we shall see. Return to the Apostles' 
Creed, for a moment, and consider attentively of what 
sort of statements it is made up. In the very first 
clause of it we have no fewer than four dogmatic as- 
sertions : namely, that there is a God ; that fatherli- 
ness is one of his characteristics ; that infinite power 
is another ; and furthermore that he puts this power 
into active exercise. " I believe in God the Father 
Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth." What is 
there here that the Church can fairly be called on to 
revise ? If she had gathered these dogmas, as the 
political economist gathers his, by observation of what 
goes on in human society ; if she had gathered them 
as the metaphysician gathers his, by observing what 
goes on in the mind of man ; if she had gathered 
them as the naturalist gathers his, by observing what 
goes on in the world material, why then it would be 
perfectly proper to insist on frequently testing her 
methods and verifying her results. 

But the Church maintains that she came into pos- • 
session of her dogmas in another way altogether. 
She did not find them out; they were told to her. 
They are hers, not by right of discovery but by bene- 
fit of gift. The first paragraph of the Creed is the 
common property of the Jewish and the Christian 



106 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

Churches, the second and the third owe their exist- 
ence to the coming into the world of One who as- 
serted Himself the Son of God ; but all three sections 
are alike in this, that their contents rest for authority 
on testimony, — the testimony of men who have some- 
how made themselves believed. 

But testimony once recorded must remain what it 
is, unless indeed you can impeach the witnesses. 
Here, for example, are certain definite statements 
made by the first century writers as to what Jesus 
said of Himself, of life, of death, of things present 
and things to come. Out of them and other like 
material the dogmas of the Church have been fash- 
ioned. We may reject the dogmas, we may utterly 
refuse to receive them ; but to ask the Church to alter 
them merely in obedience to the popular demand for 
change is most unreasonable. It is sometimes granted 
us to forget what has been done, but never is it our 
privilege to undo it. 

" Not Heaven itself upon the past hath power, 
But what hath been, hath been." 

The chemist may reinvestigate the atomic weight 
of silver, the astronomer may recompute the elements 
of a planet's period of revolution, but who shall call 
back from the dead, John, Apostle and Evangelist, that 
he may be cross-questioned and re-examined ? 

Has religion then nothing to learn from the new 
pages man's finger is continually turning in the book 
of knowledge ? Has the Church no share in the 



THE CREDENDA. 107 

harvest of light in which the world of our time 
rejoices ? 

Most assuredly, Yes ; — but the way in which the 
new knowledge is destined to help the Church is not 
by destroying her dogmas, it is rather by illustrating 
and enforcing them more powerfully than ever was 
possible before. 

There is not an article of the Creed that has been 
shaken out of its place thus far by any thunderclap 
of discovery ; neither is there one of them that has 
not been rendered more significant, more comprehen- 
sive, more august, by our knowledge of the things 
discovered. Holding fast, then, whatever has been 
with unanimity believed by Christians, let us read 
into it deeper and still deeper meanings, as knowl- 
edge grows " from more to more." The unpopularity 
of dogma is but a passing phase of feeling. The 
ages of faith have not really been outlived. Still, as 
of old, it is man's best privilege in regions where 
he cannot know, to trust ; where he cannot prove, 
to hope. 

Another way of reaching conclusions is by a study 
of alternatives. Let us try the reductio ad absurdum. 
Suppose that in a moment of disgust at dogmatism 
we determine once for all to throw the dogmatic prin- 
ciple overboard, how will it fare with us then ? Very 
much, I fancy, as it might with an imperilled ship 
whose frightened crew, not content with casting the 
superabundant cargo into the sea, were to discharge 
the ballast also. Even when relieved of what threat- 



108 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ened to sink it, a craft so circumstanced would still 
need something to steady it. 

Nothing is more instructive in this regard than the 
experience of those who from time to time start out 
full of hope and full of courage to establish and to 
administer a purely undogmatic religion. Zeal for 
ethical as distinguished from theological interests is 
usually the mainspring of such movements. It is 
a most praiseworthy incentive ; and whether the at- 
tempt take the title of *' Free Religious Association " 
or " Society for Ethical Culture " or " University Hall 
Lectureship," we cannot but applaud the courage that 
refuses to despair of goodness even after the cau^e 
of theology has been given up for lost. But can an 
undogmatic religion achieve organization ? Is it not 
like asking a jelly-fish to walk ? The question is not 
intended as a slur, I put it seriously. The movement 
I am venturing thus incidentally to criticise is no out- 
break of ignorant fanaticism ; it enjoys the leadership 
of brilliant minds ; it has eloquence and learning and 
moral earnestness enlisted in its support. What it 
is dreaming of is a Catholic Church of humanity, a 
fellowship into which Christian, Jew, and Moslem 
may enter unchallenged, provided only each confesses 
to an aspiration towards the true, the beautiful, and 
the good. 

This new remedy proposed for our spiritual ills 
differs from what used to be called free-thinking in 
its attitude towards Christianity. Free-thinking was 
avowedly hostile to the received faith ; free religion, 



THE CREDENDA. 109 

to choose for convenience' sake one out of the many 
names the movement has taken on, disclaims hostility 
and mildly proposes conciliation. 

Free-thinking was essentially destructive in its 
aims ; free religion aspires, however hopelessly, to be 
constructive. Free-thinking placed its dependence 
on the head alone ; free religion both recognizes and 
emphasizes the holy alliance between head and heart. 
Free-thinking had a baldness eminently repulsive to 
the imaginative mind ; free religion exalts the imagi- 
nation, and appeals as readily to the poetical as to 
the ratiocinative faculties of the soul. Your free- 
thinker was disposed to shut men up to hard-and-fast 
logic; your free-religionist is as ready as was Saint 
Ambrose to hisist that not by dialectics only has it 
pleased God to save his heritage. In all this the free 
religion of to-day has an apparent advantage over 
the free-thinking of yesterday; it deals more fairly 
by the facts of human nature, it breathes a better 
flavor and seems to offer a richer promise. " These 
Christians meant well," it says, " but they have lamen- 
tably blundered. Listen, and let us make plain to you 
the secret of their failure." Any voice that utters 
itself after this fashion, especially if it be one that 
has in it the unmistakable quality honest conviction 
gives to voices, is sure of a certain measure of atten- 
tion. No sensible person or careful observer is so 
completely satisfied with things as they are as not to 
be willing to acknowledge that they might conceivably 
be bettered. " You may be right," society says to 



110 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

each new prophet as he appears. '' Speak out, tell us 
what you think. Propound your plan." 

I suggest therefore that we look a little carefully 
into the case for free religion, as a preliminary step 
towards a better understanding of the dogmatic posi- 
tion taken up at Lambeth. 

The initial point from which the anti-dogmatists 
make their start, is the existence in man of a reli- 
gious instinct. This instinct, so the argument runs, 
is the universal heritage of the race. In greater or 
less force it exists and lias existed everywhere, and in 
all. Climatic, temperamental, and other causes have 
conspired to give to the external manifestations of 
this instinct, which is still everywhere essentially the 
same, a singular diversity. Religions, like plants, 
have their classes and orders. One and the same 
kind of life pervades all forms of vegetation from the 
lichen to the cedar, and the scientific mind sees in 
the countless faiths of the world only the parti-colored 
clothing which the religious instinct of mankind has 
wrapped about itself. 

It would be doing injustice to the advocates of the 
new religion to press this last illustration to extremi- 
ties. " The meanest flower that blows " has as good 
a claim to a continued existence in the world's flora 
as any other. The Free Religionists would not say 
this of the meanest superstition. They would, to be 
sure, admit the representative of the superstition to 
their conclave ; but they would do it in the hope that 
the society of wiser and better souls would purge 



THE CREDENDA. Ill 

his ignorance. Hence they would give him, so to 
speak, a seat without a vote.- They are not so weak 
as to maintain that all religions are equally true and 
equally good ; only they would make their amnesty, 
at the outset, cover all, trusting to some happy law of 
natural selection to weed out error in " the process 
of the suns." 

The illustration of the flora is, however, thus far 
good that it does explain, imless I unintentionally 
misconceive their theory, the notion of the advocates 
of the new scheme with regard to the origin of the 
existing state of things. Religions, so they argue, are 
what they are because the laws of the universe are 
what they are. We human creatures are no more to 
blame for not agreeing in one faith than the brute 
earth is to blame because she finds herself belted 
with zones of varying temperature, and districted 
among families of men who cannot understand each 
other's speech. 

It is easy to see what place Christianity must hold 
in such a scheme. It is at best a reMgio licita, and 
only a religio pro tempore licita at that. Jesus may 
have his place in the new Pantheon, but the statue 
must stand upon no raised dais. The Nazarene must 
not overtop him of the Porch, or even him of the 
Garden. Indeed a disciple of the new religion will, 
if he be consistent, claim the right to sink Christi- 
anity a little below the level of average religions. A 
late leader of English thought plainly intimated that 
in his judgment the religion of the cross would be 



112 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

improved by a larger infusion of pagan virtue ; and I 
well remember the adroit way in which a New Eng- 
land Brahmin years ago parried a question which 
some of his speculations had called forth. " Will not 
such reasoning," asked the disciple, " carry us back 
again into heathenism ? " '' Say rather forivard into 
heathenism," was the acute reply. Yes, let the Chris- 
tian candidate for entrance into the fellowship of un- 
dogmatic religion fully and clearly understand that 
he goes as a contributor, nothing more. Whatever 
else may be allowed, tlie claim of the Son of Mary to 
universal kingship will never be. Our new prophets 
simply propose to cast into the blast-furnace of public 
opinion all the old worn-out creeds they can lay hands 
on, in the vague hope that when, after fusion, the 
molten stream of mingled faiths flows out, it may 
spontaneously run itself into some shape of beauty 
that shall entrance mankind. But the religion we 
have thus far professed has ever shown itself un- 
friendly to any amalgam or alloy. Christianity is at 
once the most inclusive and the most exclusive of all 
religions. It is inclusive, because it proposes to itself 
no less a task than the conversion of the world ; but 
then the world is to be converted to Christianity, not 
to something else. Forget this, if you would enter 
into the spirit and the life of the new movement. 

But why do I say " movement " ? If the new re- 
ligion were only what I have thus far pictured it, 
would it deserve so dignified a name ? It might rank 
as a fresh system of theological eclecticism, but 



THE CREDENDA. 113 

scarcely as " a movement " in any adequate sense of 
that word. And yet we shall see, as we look further 
into our subject, that in the very fact of its being a 
movement lies the really distinctive feature of the 
scheme we have stepped aside to study. For a num- 
ber of metaphysical minds to interest themselves in 
following out certain processes of formal logic is one 
thing. For these same minds to attempt important 
changes in the structure of civil society, in order that 
it may the better harmonize with their conclusions, is 
quite another thing. Now this last is what the new 
religion proposes. To its recognition of the religious 
instinct in man, it superadds a recognition of the 
social instinct, and, rightly persuaded that no good 
results can follow unless these two instincts cordially 
conspire, it says, " We must have organization." But 
can there be organization with no formula of concord 
upon which to build ? Can there be, I mean, any bet- 
ter and more lasting organization than is implied in 
getting together under one roof, choosing an officer 
to preside over the meeting, and appointing a secre- 
tary and a treasurer ? 

Not if it be true, as true I have been maintaining it 
to be, that all forms of associated life, whether secular 
or religious, whether called churches, states, confed- 
erations, fraternities, or leagues, owe their stability to 
a corner-stone of dogma. 

The apostles of ethical culture have a great many 
beautiful and eloquent things to say about "work." 
We ought to forsake controversy, they tell us, and 

8 



114 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

take to working together in the fellowship of the 
spirit to bless our fellow-men. Quite right. But 
what is work ? Waiving the very highest definition 
of all, — " This is the work of God, that ye believe on 
Him whom He hath sent," take instead some such 
interpretation of the word as all will be willing to 
accept. Here is one : — " Pure religion and undefiled 
before God and the Father is this ; to visit the father- 
less and widows in their affliction." This is a kind 
of " work " which all will agree ought to be done. 
But how ? Not simply by carrying supplies of food 
and clothing to the house of sorrow. If there be 
poverty under the roof it may be well, delicately, to 
do this ; but you are a sorry " worker " if you can do 
no more. The fatherless and widows whom the au- 
thor of our phrase had in mind were not neces- 
sarily paupers. What these orphaned and desolate 
fellow-creatures of yours have the most need of, and 
the best right to ask for, is the ministry of comfort. 
You enter determined, in a thoroughly anti-dogm-atic 
spirit, to exercise it. You discover, perhaps a little 
to your dismay, that grief has questions to ask, urgent 
questions, questions that will not be put by. How do 
you propose to set to " work " to satisfy this widowed 
soul? "Tell me, thou minister of comfort," the 
woman vehemently demands, " is there any hope?" 
" Some have thought so," — you may answer, if you 
will ; but beware of letting any such tone of confi- 
dence betray itself in your voice as might offend your 
brother the Agnostic, or your brother the Pantheist, 



THE CREDENDA. 115 

or your brother the Positivist. You are pledged to 
" work '^ with them : " work " is the gracious object 
that has brought you into one common fraternity ; 
possibly these brethren have happened to come with 
you on this very errand of consolation. Remember 
the terms of the compact. Your co-operation is to be 
strictly " undogmatic," a working together in " the 
fellowship of the spirit." Should you be rash enough 
to tell those questioning souls anything definite about 
a living God and a life to come, these companions of 
yours would, as they valued truth, be bound to declare 
after you had gone that your " living God " and your 
"life to come" were only make-believe. Would not 
the widow and the fatherless have been the happier 
had they been left unvisited ? Might not the doing 
of such work as this more properly be called undoing? 
This is not exaggeration ; it is the simple testing of 
a theory by the acid of common sense. If three men 
cannot " work " together in comforting one household, 
is anything better to be expected from those more 
ambitious efforts that look towards the amelioration 
of the life of whole communities ? You may build a 
benevolent institution as large as St. Peter's, and 
write it all over with the catch-words of advanced 
thought, but unless you have some better thing to say 
to the unfortunates whom you put into it than merely, 
" Be ye warmed and filled," it is a failure. The truth 
is, this generation owes its aspirations after philan- 
thropy to that very faith which it proposes to displace. 
The first Napoleon has been called the matricide of 



116 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

democracy. The child of the Revolution, he scrupled 
not to kill in cold blood the mother that bore him. 
A ghost for ever haunts his dynasty. Even so, should 
our new religion become the matricide of the Church 
of Christ, the memory of the sweet mother slain 
would follow it reproachfully to the end. 

Another fatal defect in the practical working of 
the proposed scheme must lie in its utter want of any 
cultus worthy to be called such. By a cultus we un- 
derstand that growth of usages, habits, observances, 
and associations that springs up spontaneously around 
any settled form of faith. The cultus may be said to 
clothe the dogma, just as the flesh of a human body 
clothes the hard, strong framework upon which it 
rests. 

Public worship, consecrated buildings, sacramen- 
tal rites, holy days and seasons, these make a part of 
the Christian cultus. But only think how it would 
impoverish human life were all these things to be 
obliterated. What would become of art and literature, 
to say nothing of social intercourse, if all that they 
have drawn from the treasure-house of the Christian 
Church were to be disowned and put out of sight ? 
Look, for instance, at the only substitute the new 
religion has to offer for the time-honored observance 
of public worship. A liturgy is out of the question, for 
a liturgy must of necessity be inwrought with dogma. 
Where there is uncertainty as to whether the God 
addressed be personal or impersonal, all spoken 
prayer is aimless ; it is impossible to give any pro- 



THE CREDENDA. 117 

longed utterance to blank aspiration ; the list of the 
interjections is brief. Take out of the Litany of the 
Book of Common Prayer, for example, all that links 
it to special circumstances, either in our Saviour's 
life or in our own, and what is left ? Nothing. The 
new religion must, therefore, limit its public exercises 
to an exchange of thought between mind and mind. 
Lectures and discussions are its only " means of 
grace; " a club, a library, or a reading-room its holiest 
sanctuary. Should we be gainers by the change ? I 
venture to think not. Essays are entertaining and 
instructive sometimes, and debates exciting ; but are 
these things valid substitutes for the worship of the 
ages ? Would they not be likely, in the long run, to 
pall upon the taste even more seriously than the dull 
sermons and formal prayers and lifeless hymns of 
which we hear so much complaint ? The non-Chris- 
tian critics are continually falling out of patience with 
our " cant." Does it never occur to them that, one 
day, they may fall out of patience with their own ? 
No cant is so unspeakably wearisome as the cant of 
unbelief. We can bear to be reminded once and twice 
and thrice that we are in leading-strings, that we are 
clogs upon the wheels of progress, that we love dark- 
ness rather than light, that the curse of barrenness is 
upon all our thought ; but really we hear so much of 
this that one questions what will be left in the Millen- 
nium of the new religion to form the staple of dis- 
course. It is worth thinking of whether it will not be 
well, even when the golden year of Liberalism has 



118 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

come, to retain a few representatives of the old order 
for the purposes of practice in rhetorical invective 
if for nothing else ? 

But it is said, What need of any cultus ? Let life 
itself, the common daily life of men, answer for the 
clothing of religion. When Sundays and Churches 
and Sacraments and all such ancient superstitions 
have been removed out of the way, then life itself 
will be so pure, so beautiful, that no special cultus 
will be needed to make it more so. Ah, we know 
what that means. We know what human life would 
be, robbed of all outward aids to holiness. We know 
that it would speedily become self-centred, grasping, 
churlish, sensual, devilish. Perhaps it is possible for 
a few men of refined sensibilities and a naturally 
quick moral instinct to cut themselves loose from the 
old moorings and still remain themselves generous, 
high-minded, and unselfish. But what is possible for 
an individual may not be possible for a community. 
We know that in England, for example, the refined 
Positivism of the Universities as it filters down 
through the strata of society thickens into secularism 
in the class just above the lowest, and hardens into 
animalism in the lowest class of all. And so we 
might find that were the creedless religion to be gen- 
erally accepted here in America, it would cease to 
be, as it now is, eloquent in the praise of the Chris- 
tian graces, and would become for the many the cloak 
of selfishness and vice. Listen to what Sainte-Beuve 
writes to M. Taine, — agnostics both of them. 



THE CREDENDA. 119 

" You make an observation upon my ' Port Royal.' 
. . . There is a fine basis, you say, a broad basis in 
natural morality, in virtue as understood by Aristotle, 
Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, etc. I must confess to you 
that what has always embarrassed the expression of 
my thought in this direction and kept my adhesion 
back, is the fact that I have not as optimistic an opin- 
ion of humanity as that which I see among all these 
natural moralists. I am much more struck by the 
miseries, the imperfections, the vices, the animal 
coarseness, over which people imagine that it is easy 
to triumph. This ' natural morality ' of which I de- 
sire the reign, and which in antiquity was the lot of 
an elite, seems to me very little advanced among the 
moderns, especially if you consider the masses. The 
nations which are praised sur parole and celebrated at 
a distance, are found to be far in arrears. You must 
be a Laboulaye before you believe that there is no 
corruption in North America. Our Algeria is dy- 
ing of absinthe ; so are our manufacturing cities of 
the north. If Rome is rotting, Geneva is becoming 
coarse. I see everywhere an animality and a brutal- 
ity, which discourage me and adjourn my hope of 
the triumph of a healthy and scientific morality ; I 
am contented with admiring and respecting it in a 
few." 

This is honest certainly ; and we have from a writer 
of similar genius on the other side of the English 
Channel a like testimony. " The history of self-sacri- 
fice during the last eighteen hundred years," writes Mr. 



120 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

Leckj, in the closing paragraphs of the book that first 
brought him into notice, " has been mainly the his- 
tory of the action of Christianity on the world." He 
glories over the great advances of modern civilization, 
with which he credits the principle of free thought. 
" But then, " he adds, " when we look back to the 
cheerful alacrity with which, in some former ages, 
men sacrificed all their material and intellectual in- 
terests to what they believed to be right, and when 
we realize the unclouded assurance that was their 
reward, it is impossible to deny that we have lost 
something in our progress." 

Was there ever a better illustration than this scho- 
lium affords of Moses' boast, — " Their rock is not as 
our rock, even our enemies themselves being the 
judges " ? 

The pursuit of undogmatic religion entails yet an- 
other disappointment. We have seen that Avithout 
dogma there can be no concert of action between man 
and man and no cultus worthy of the name. These 
are losses that concern associated life. But it is fur- 
ther true that without dogma there can be for the 
individual no such thing as intellectual peace. Se- 
rious men are not content to catch at truth as chil- 
dren catch at fire-flies, pleased with success and almost 
equally content with failure. In the great emergen- 
cies of life, the mind brought face to face with the 
problem of destiny longs for the ability to say with a 
clear voice, " I believe." To man thus circumstanced 
the Christian Church exhibits her immemorial wit- 



THE CREDENDA. 121 

ness; while free religion offers him only the sorry 
comfort of a guess. 

It is true that the " full assurance " secured by as- 
sent to the Church's witness is " the full assurance of 
faith," in contrast with the full assurance that follows 
upon demonstration, but the certitude attained is none 
the less satisfactory in the one case than in the other ; 
it avails for the purposes of living, and that is the 
main point. Christ's religion asserts that it has a 
distinct message for us ; undogmatic religion boasts 
that it has none, the broken chrysalis is its strongest 
argument for immortality, a song-bird its best proof 
that " God is love." The Christian Church meets a 
man with the Creed in her hands, the simple Creed of 
universal Christendom ; and she says, " I cannot force 
this faith upon you, I cannot compel you to accept it. 
I can only say that if you do welcome it, if you will 
make it the foundation-stone of all your religious 
thinking, there will follow, as consequence upon cause, 
intellectual peace. Of course there rests with you, 
in this matter, the power of contrary choice ; but on 
the whole, considering how this Creed of mine stands 
accredited by the past, considering all it has accom- 
plished in the earth for peoples as well as for single 
souls, is it not a more reasonable thing on your part 
to believe than it would be to disbelieve ? Is not the 
case for faith indefinitely stronger than the case for 
no faith ? Does not the postulate justify itself in the 
results ? " 

The promise held out by the adversaries of dogma 



122 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

is an enticing one ; "Liberty " and " Truth " are their 
favorite watchwords. But to be landed in nega- 
tion is to find one's self fast bound in misery and 
iron, — a strange sort of liberty ; and as for " truth," 
what is it worth to us if we are under oath never to 
set it forth without an interrogation mark attached ? 
Augustine puts it well in the Confessions. He also, 
it appears, while philosophizing in the schools of Car- 
thage, had heard this same illusive and elusive prom- 
ise. " They cried out ' Truth ! Truth I ' and spake 
much thereof to me ; yet it was not in them. 
Truth ! Truth ! how inwardly did even then the mar- 
row of my sold pant after thee, when they often and 
in many books echoed of thee to me, though it was 
an echo and no more ! " 

Passing now from the negative line of reasoning 
to the less ungracious and more congenial positive 
method, I call attention to a certain close intimacy 
that knits together two things, frequently, but 
most unwisely, represented as mutually antagonistic, 
*' faith" and "the faith." Many persons now-a-days 
who confess themselves eager for more faith turn 
frigid at any mention of " the faith," as if an iceberg 
had suddenly swum into their sea. But the New 
Testament writers to a man are unconscious of the 
supposed dissonance. They never weary of ringing 
the changes on the possibilities of faith. Sometimes 
they seem to be thinking of it as an appetency, some- 
times as an energy of the soul, now as the hand 
stretched out to grasp, and again as the mouth opened 



THE CREDENDA. 123 

to receive ; but, be it this or that, be it active effort or 
passive receptivity, faith as a spiritual characteristic 
stands at the head of the list, the one indispensable 
condition precedent to our knowledge of the God who 
made us. 

On the other hand, we kill the climax of one of 
Paul's most animating utterances if we disallow the 
contrasted phrase, for he sums up the whole record 
of his life's struggle thus, — "I have kept the faith." 
Manifestly if he had kept the faith, there must have 
been in his judgment a faith to keep, — a certain some- 
thing to be most surely believed, most tenaciously 
grasped, clung to through evil report and good. It is 
the tone not of one who has guessed out a philosophy of 
religion ; rather he speaks as the man into whose cus- 
tody there has been given a definite deposit of truth. 
Unless Paul in all this was utterly mistaken, it follows 
that faith has an intellectual as well as an emotional 
side, and that to define it as being wholly and only 
" a feeling " is a weak concession to the demands of 
the hour. The affections and the mind are both of 
them beholden to faith, and faith to them. In these 
days of easy divorce men clamor for a separation 
between head and heart ; but woe be to him who puts 
asunder those whom God has joined together. " Faith " 
is the offspring of wedded heart and head, and " the 
faith " is the inheritance to which, by the terms both 
of the Old Testament and of its codicil the New, this 
child is heir. 

Faith as an intellectual energy starts from the prop- 



124 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

osition " God is." Manifestly the mind must accept this 
modicum of fact before the feelings and the will can 
have anything to act upon. Whenever we see living 
flowers upon a stalk, somewhere we may be sure there 
either is or was a root. Dogma is the root of faith, 
and there can be no blossoming of the religious affec- 
tions that does not consciously or unconsciously draw 
vitality through that. We risk nothing in thus conced- 
ing to the mind an important part in the act of faith. 
The vice of rationalism is not that it honors reason, 
but that it confounds faith with knowledge, and de- 
mands from God mathematical demonstrations of his 
truth. There is a difference between believing and 
knowing. Were there no difference we should not 
need the two words. I know that the whole is greater 
than any of its parts. I believe in the resurrection of 
the dead. Yet the believing is just as much an intel- 
lectual process as the knowing, and I cannot possibly 
say the Creed without an exercise of the mind. 

But is this all ? Have we exhausted the meaning 
of faith when we have found that it is the assent of 
the judgment, the acquiescence of the thinking part 
of us ? Certainly not. Faith means more than this, 
a vast deal more, otherwise might the demons who 
believe no longer shudder. The biographer of Fred- 
erick Robertson tells us in one place how it was a 
characteristic of that sensitive and high-born spirit to 
be for ever pondering the question. What constitutes 
the essence of a " saving " faith ? He rebelled, as well 
he might, against the notion that correct thinking 



THE CREDENDA. 125 

could of itself carry a man into the kingdom of God. 
He was determined that his final definition of faith 
should, when he formed it, do full justice to the 
heart. And what does faith mean to the heart ? 
Evidently trust, confidence, reliance, loyalty, — feel- 
ings all of them, and feelings moreover that call for 
a person, a conscious some one, towards whom they 
are to be exercised. A child clinging to his father's 
hand in a forest-path at night and feeling safe be- 
cause it is his father's hand to which he clings, — this 
is faith. A woman believing in her lover's constancy 
although oceans divide him from her, and no message 
has come home for months, — this is faith. A boat's 
crew saved from a wreck trusting themselves wholly 
to the direction and control of one of their number, 
because they believe him most fit from his experience 
of seamanship to be their pilot, — this is faith. A 
handful of soldiers following a brave man on some 
forlorn hope, not forlorn for them because they love 
their leader and hold his courage as the pledge of vic- 
tory, — this is faith. Heart-work in every instance, 
and heart-work moreover of a sort that necessitates 
a personal object. It is only by a metaphor, a figure 
of speech, that we can associate faith, the feeling, with 
an inanimate object. We may say that a workman 
has " confidence " in his tools, that a woodsman 
" trusts " the bough by which he swings himself 
across a mountain stream, that a capitalist " puts 
faith" in his bank; but in so speaking we use the 
words " confidence " and " trust " and " faith " in a 



126 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

figurative sense. These words convey their full and 
legitimate meaning only when it is a person in whom 
we confide or trust or put faith, for we can only feel 
towards one who is, or has been, himself capable of 
feeling. 

This position once accepted, — namely, that faith 
means for the mind assent, for the heart trust, — it 
follows as a matter of course that there cannot be head- 
faith without a statement to be believed, or heart-faith 
without a person to be believed in. Faith as an appetite 
of the intellect demands for its food statements that 
are true. Faith as an appetite of the heart calls for a 
person worthy to be trusted. Truth and the true One, 
these taken together are what faith demands. How 
does the Christian religion set itself to the task of 
meeting and satisfying this twofold need ? Not in 
any one-sided, scant, or partial way ; not by freezing 
all religion into dogma, nor yet by melting it all into 
emotion. How then ? Simply by so presenting what 
Paul proudly calls " the faith " that men shall see and 
own in it the living presence of the person Christ. 
It is told us in connection with Paul's visit to Athens, 
that the philosophers who met him in the market- 
place were moved to curiosity and willingness to hear 
him further, because he preached unto them " Jesus 
and the resurrection." Here in four words lies wrapt 
the secret after which many a weary seeker in our 
day has toiled in vain. Flouted by Stoics and pitied 
by Epicureans, Paul preached "Jesus and the resur- 
rection." He slighted, that is to say, neither of the 



THE CREDENDA. 127 

two claims of faith. To the mind he presented for 
acceptance a new truth, " the resurrection," to the 
heart a new object of affectionate confidence, " Jesus." 
Believe the fact, believe in the person, — this was his 
appeal. 

Passing from Athens to Rome, what is it that we 
find distinguishing Christian people from other people 
in the days of the Caesars ? Clearly the holding of a 
distinctive and a definable faith, and the holding it 
with fervor. Whenever the populace raised the cry 
" The Christians to the lions ! " there was always one 
way of escape, — renunciation of the faith. On one 
side lay the implements of torture ; on the other, home, 
friends, and a life of quietness. All hinged on the 
answer to the judge's question, Wilt thou or wilt thou 
not disown this faith ? Evidently an undogmatic re- 
ligion would in those days have saved many a life. 
But would the Church have lived ? 

"If blessed Paul had staid in cot or learned shade, 
With the priest's white attire, and the saints' tuneful choir, 
Men had not gnashed their teeth, nor risen to slay, 
But thou hadst been a heathen in thy day." 

We do ill, therefore, to set " faith " and " the faith " 
in opposition, saying to the one, " Thy dominion is of 
the heart," and to the other, '' Thine is of the head." 
A complete religion is one in which we see the faith 
spelt out in words that may be known and read of all 
men, while yet there is not one single letter in the 
whole epigraph that does not glow with flame. 



128 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

The Bishops at Lambeth took up a definite position 
with respect to dogma. Their estimate of the meas- 
ure of dogmatic agreement antecedently essential to 
the attainment of unity was expressed in the follow- 
ing words, " The Apostles' Creed as the Baptismal 
Symbol ; and the Nicene Creed as the sufficient state- 
ment of the Christian Faith." 

When we remember how large an amount of dogma 
used to be insisted upon as necessary, this has, upon 
the face of it, the look of taking in sail under stress 
of weather, — and in that sense many observers, both 
within and without the pale of the Christian Church, 
have doubtless understood it. Here, they have said, 
is a plain concession to the menaces of criticism. 
Modern scholarship has proved itself too much for 
the confessions, and the creed-principle is evidently 
doomed. It is not to be yielded at once, but what we 
see is the beginning of the end. 

Such inferences have a plausible look, and yet, 
when we think of it, all that the Bishops did was to 
reaffirm the doctrinal position of the early Church. 
Short confessions were the rule in the beginning ; to 
return to them is unquestionably an acknowledgment 
of having gained wisdom by experience, but is by no 
means tantamount to a surrender of first principles, 
— on the contrary, it is a solemn reassertion of first 
principles. Were the Creed to be reduced to a single 
proposition, that one statement would carry with it 
as effective an assertion of authority, as four-score 
sentences could do. The length of the armature is 



THE CREDENDA. 129 

no test of the reality of the magnet. The question 
is, What is resident in the steel ? 

But over and above an implied insistence upon the 
principle of dogma, we note in the Lambeth state- 
ment an evident intention to discriminate between 
classes of believers. The Apostles' Creed is spoken 
of as a formulary for universal use ; it is the " baptis- 
mal symbol," a thing to be written, as it were, on the 
very door-posts of the Church, an entrance lesson, a 
part of the initiative process itself. None is to be 
accounted too ignorant to be taught so much as this, 
none is to be thought of as so well-informed that with 
this he may dispense ; it binds all : it is the minimum 
of Christian dogma. Equally evident is the intention 
to set forth the Nicene Creed as the maximum of the 
Church's doctrinal requirement, for this formulary 
is declared to be the " sufficient " statement of the 
Christian faith. In other words, the Apostles' Creed 
is to be regarded as the popular, and the Nicene 
Creed as the precise and, so to say, scientific setting 
forth of "those things which are most surely believed 
among us." It is not that the one Creed is supposed 
really to contain any more truth than the other, but 
only that the shorter of the two formularies is by its 
wording the better adapted to the needs of all sorts 
and conditions of men, while the longer more com- 
pletely meets the requirements of those who critically 
demand of the Church her " statement." And I say 
this not forgetful of the fact that the difference be- 
tween the two creeds finds its historical explanation 



130 THE PEACE OP THE CHURCH. 

in the contrast between Eastern and Western methods 
of religious thought. The Nicene formulary germi- 
nated in Asiatic, the Apostles' in European soil, and 
each reflects the intellectual habitudes of the region 
that gave it birth. In other words, the distinction I 
have drawn between a scientific and a popular mode 
of statement seems not to have been had in view at 
the outset. Oriental teachers simply expressed them- 
selves after their fashion, occidental teachers after 
theirs. But seeing that the two creeds do really, both 
in form and substance, suggest to a western eye such 
a contrast as I have described, the Bishops at Lam- 
beth chose wisely in phrasing their utterance as they 
did. 

Turning to the question of the adaptability of these 
ancient formularies to present-day needs, I observe 
that the ultimate analysis resolves each of them into 
the Christian Name of God. Whether we take the 
Apostolic or the Nicene symbol, we find in either case 
that the three paragraphs answer severally to "Fath- 
er," " Son," and " Holy Ghost." In the one formu- 
lary the amplification is comparatively slight, in the 
other comparatively full, but one and the same tri- 
personal framework is common to them both. About 
the name of the Father are grouped the thoughts 
proper to creation, origin, and source ; about the 
name of the Son, the characteristics of mediatorship ; 
about the name of the Spirit, the unitive and energiz- 
ing functions of the Eternal ; but it is all one Name 
set forth in one strong confession ; it is the voice of 



THE CREDENDA. 131 

the Holy Church throughout all the world acknowl- 
edging the Father, of an infinite Majesty, the ador- 
able, true, and only Son, also the Holy Ghost the 
Comforter. 

The special value of the Apostles' Creed for popu- 
lar use and as a doctrinal test of fitness for admission 
to Church privileges reveals itself in these four fea- 
tures, simplicity of language, brevity of compass', 
positiveness of form, antiquity of origin. Because it 
is simply worded, the unlettered can be taught it ; 
because it is short, little children can have it stamped 
upon their memories for ever ; because it is affirma- 
tive, it encourages hope ; because it is ancient, it com- 
mands confidence ; that which has outlasted the 
wear and tear of many generations will, we are en- 
couraged to believe, manifest the same staying pow- 
er till the end. It is true that " the new Astronomy " 
(scarcely any longer new) and " the new Chemistry " 
and "the new Biology" have suggested certain diffi- 
culties of interpretation in the case of two of the 
articles of this Creed, the Descent into hell and the 
Resurrection of the body, the stress of which was 
hardly felt in former times ; but the difficulties are 
surface difficulties, and the putting them forward has 
only served the purpose of making our insight into 
the real meaning of the phrases themselves more 
profound than was possible before. 

The chief value of the longer Creed set forth at 
Niciea in a.d. 325 and given its final form at Con- 
stantinople fifty-six years later, lies in its uncompro- 



132 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

mising assertion of the divinity of Christ. This is a 
question that cannot be waived ; it is the old test 
question " Whose Son is he ?" To treat it as a point 
of purely theological interest having no real contact 
with practical religion is to mislead. Between the 
two propositions," Jesus Christ was a man, and a man 
only," "Jesus Christ was man and God," there is a 
great gulf fixed. Our whole attitude towards Jesus 
Christ is affected and determined according as we 
elect to throw in our lot with the one estimate or the 
other. If it be urged, as urged it often is, that while 
Christ was here in the flesh, the giving in of adhesion 
to Him was a much simpler affair, involving only an 
expression of personal confidence, the proper reply is 
that the essence of discipleship is now precisely what 
it was then, with this single point of difference, • — that 
the present withdrawal of the Christ from the field of 
open vision necessitates our knowing Him by picture, 
instead of by person. The Creed is this picture. 
To wipe out of it the lines that indicate divinity 
would mean not merely to impair, but to destroy the 
likeness. Only occasionally, it is true, were even the 
twelve disciples privileged to see 

" . . . the God within Him light his face,'' 

and before only three out of these twelve was He 
transfigured ; and yet, just as we say of a portrait 
that it ought to show a man at his best, so may we 
say reverently of the Creed that unless it presents 
Christ to us at his highest it fails. 



THE CREDENDA. 133 

A criticism of a very different sort is sometimes 
passed upon the Nicene Creed. Theologians of a 
certain school insist that as a formulary it is inade- 
quate to the needs of the modern Church, because it 
has almost nothing to say about " the plan of salva- 
tion," — lays so little stress on the natural depravity 
of man, and observes complete silence with respect to 
many of the points that seem essential for the strategy 
of present-day controversialists. But, as a profound 
religious thinker not so very many years ago re- 
marked, " to base theology upon the dogma of sin, 
instead of on the dogma of God, is a mistake." Per- 
haps it was by their clear perception of this truth 
that the Bishops were moved to choose the adjective 
they did. " The Nicene Creed as the sufficient state- 
ment of the Christian Faith " is their phrase. " Suf- 
ficient " indeed it is, setting forth, as it so grandly 
does, what God has told us of Himself, and leaving 
unsaid what we may safely *be trusted to find out for 
ourselves, in our wretchedness and poverty, namely, 
our sore need of the One who can be thus described. 
Yes, anthropology can be trusted to teach itself, for 
" what man knoweth the things of a man, save the 
spirit of man which is in him ; " it is theology, the 
knowledge of the true God, we need to have instilled 
into us. Only let men become persuaded of the high 
dignity of Him who for them and for their salvation 
came down from heaven, and there will be little doubt- 
fulness in their minds as to the gravity of the crisis, the 
soreness of the emergency, that made such a humili- 



134 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ation necessary. Among ourselves, the spectacle of 
another's greatness is often as effectual a lesson in 
modesty as painful meditations upon our own little- 
ness ; and it is equally true in religion that when once 
convinced of the high lineage of Him whom the Nicene 
Creed declares to be one with the Father in whatever is 
essential to divinity, we cannot hesitate long as to the 
attitude it behooves us to take as suppliants before 
the throne. Was a person of this dignity " crucified 
dead, and buried " ? The very statement carries with 
it an implication of unworthiness on man's part such 
as ten thousand penitential litanies would be insuffi- 
cient to express. That " the Infinite " and " the Ab- 
solute " of the philosophers is in reality such a one as 
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, such a one as 
the life pictured in the four Grospels would suggest, — 
this is what we need to be told, and this is what the 
Creed tells us. Having been told this, we may be 
trusted to give the right shading to our doctrine of 
human nature without help from formularies. When 
once the sun has risen, the eye has little trouble in 
picking out the dark spots in the landscape. We 
conclude, then, that in spite of its silence upon human 
nature and its depravity the Nicene Creed is a " suffi- 
cient statement of the Christian faith." 

Doubtless even after this shall have been conceded 
there will remain for discussion and settlement sun- 
dry important questions of detail. Historical scholars 
will have to have their say as to the limits of the for- 
mulary ; textual critics will wish to know all that can 



THE CREDENDA. 135 

be known as to the authentic wording of it ; while 
students of English are scarcely likely to rest satisfied 
with the present inadequate and, in some points, ab- 
solutely misleading translation. But these are fields 
of discussion upon which I do not propose to enter. 
Similar embarrassments have from the beginning be- 
set all efforts to give currency to Holy Scripture, but 
in spite of them the Bible has become the great book 
of the people, and is certain to continue such. 

The strong point of both the Apostles' and the 
Nicene Creeds as respects fitness for the task of uni- 
fying the believers is their sturdy realism. Modern 
creed-makers have condescended to argument; these 
ancient voices simply enunciate the facts. They set 
forth certain great objects of faith, and say to man. 
Look at them. They invite, not to the speculative 
discussion, but to the reverent contemplation of things 
that have been, are, and are yet for to come. The 
manger, the cross, the broken sepulchre, these after 
all are what make the real centre of unity. About 
these sacred places men of the most divergent ways 
of thinking may be well content to meet, suffering all 
their controversies to be swallowed up in the glad 
confession that " God has visited and redeemed his 
people." 

The time for originating creeds, if indeed there 
ever was such a time, has gone by. You may make 
a brand-new one to-day, and fondly flatter yourself 
that you have put into it not only the accumulated 
wisdom of the past, but also all the newer truth that 



136 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

modern discovery has unveiled ; to-morrow's critic 
will find a flaw in your work, and before you are an 
old man yourself your creed will have been forgotten. 
Meanwhile, there will live on, while you live and after 
you have gone, those ancient formularies, incompara- 
ble for simplicity and sturdy strength, which have 
been the shelter of holy and humble men of heart 
through many generations, — "I believe in God the 
Father Almighty " their first words ; " the life of the 
world to come " their last. 



IV. 
THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 



All things, as many as pertain to offices and matters ecclesiastical, be 
full of divine significations and mysteries, and overflow with a celestial 
sweetness; if so be that a man be diligent in his study of them, and know 
how to draw honey from the rock, and oil from the hardest stone. , . . 
Wherefore I, William, by the alone tender mercy of God, Bishop of the 
Holy Church which is in Mende, will knock diligently at the door, if so be 
that the Key of David will open unto me; that the King may bring me in 
to his treasury and shoAV unto me the heavenly pattern which was showed 
unto Moses in the mount. — Durandus. Preface to the Rationale. 

Because there are two great sermons of the Gospel, which are the sum 
total and abbreviative of the whole word of God, the great messages of the 
Word incarnate, Christ was pleased to invest these two words with two sacra- 
ments, and assist those two sacraments, as He did the whole word of God, 
with the presence of his Spirit, that in them we might do more signally and 
solemnly what was in the ordinary ministrations done plainly and without 
extraordinary regards. — Jeremy Taylor. 



lY. 

THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 

Having affirmed the relation of the Scriptures and 
of the Creeds to unitv, the Bishops at Lambeth give 
the third place in their summary of essentials to " the 
Sacraments." Their minimum under this head is thus 
defined : — 

" The two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself^ — 
Baptism and the Supper of the Lord^ — ministered ivith 
unfailing use of Chrisfs ivords of institutiori, and of 
the elements ordained by SimP 

Thus addressed, we find ourselves face to face with 
the great question of symbolism, — the origin of it, the 
uses of it, the measure of it. In the whole territory 
of religious thought there is scarcely a patch of ground 
that has been more hotly contested. Some go the 
length of making symbolism and religion contermin- 
ous. Take away our tokens, they declare, and you 
extinguish our faith. Others again are so nervously 
sensitive to the peril of conceding to the outward 
and visible sign the honors rightfully due only to the 
inward and invisible thing signified, that they let 
their dislike of symbolism carry them to the point of 
setting aside, as having been intended for merely 
temporary use, even the two sacraments ordained by 



140 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

Christ Himself. Divergencies so grave as this are 
never without cause ; the origin of them is usually 
to be sought far back in the very groundwork of 
human nature itself. But formidable though the 
task of search may look, we are bound to undertake 
it ; for we shall find it impossible to do justice to the 
position taken up at Lambeth unless we can first 
attain to clear notions with respect to certain prin- 
ciples that underlie, not the two sacraments only, but 
equally whatsoever else there may be in life that 
deserves to be called sacramental. Undoubtedly the 
nexus that binds symbolism to religion is a knotted 
and tangled skein ; but unless we can somehow con- 
trive to straighten out the threads, we shall have to 
reconcile ourselves, as best we may, to a confused 
theology. To so disappointing a conclusion we ought 
not to let ourselves be shut up without effort. 

By a symbol is commonly meant either an object or 
an action understood to be emblematic and represen- 
tative of some spiritual, or, if not spiritual, at any rate 
invisible reality. Tersely defined, symbolism is that 
whereby the outward eye of the body aids the inner eye 
of the mind in the exercise of its own proper vision. 
I say this, not forgetful of the fact that forms of words 
are sometimes spoken of as symbols, and this too in 
direct connection with theology. A writer on dogma- 
tics, when he treats of symbols and symbolism, has in 
mind creeds and the study of them; forms of faith, 
and not at all such forms as come under the definition 
I just now gave. Thus we read in Church history of 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 141 

" the symbol of Nicaea," " the Athanasian symbol," 
" the symbolical books of the Reformation ; " and, in 
fact, this very summary we are studying has, as we 
have just seen, the expression, " the Apostles' Creed, 
as the baptismal symbol^ This is clearly a very dif- 
ferent use of language from that which we follow 
when we speak of incense as a symbol ; or of lights, 
vestments, bowings, crossings, and genuflexions as 
symbolic. 

The reason why one and the same word should have 
two such apparently dissimilar meanings, is not far to 
seek ; and since it will involve no very prolonged 
excursus into the region of etymology, I shall ask you 
to go with me on the search. 

" Symbol " comes from a familiar Greek verb, mean- 
ing to throw together. But one of the commonest mo- 
tives for throwing things together is that they may be 
compared, and their points of likeness and of unlikeness 
brought to view. This is just what is accomplished 
by the material symbol. By aid of it the visible and 
the invisible, the thing seen and the thing unseen are 
thrown together, collated, so to speak, in order that 
by the aid of the more familiar the less familiar may 
be understood, as when we make hlach the symbol of 
sorrow, or light the symbol of truth, or iveeds the 
symbol of the spreading power that seems to inhere 
in wickedness. This is plain enough ; but how came 
creeds ever to be known as symbols ? What is there 
about sharp-cut verbal statements of doctrine that en- 
titles them to be given the same name by which we 



142 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

describe a token or emblem ? Why, indeed, unless it 
be that words when we look at them long enough are 
seen to be themselves nothing but emblems of the 
unseen realities for which they stand ? All language 
is in its very nature figurative, representative ; and, in 
the last analysis, is found to be a mere aggregation 
of symbols. This fact forces itself upon us in such 
expressions as, " the head of the army " and " the 
foot of the mountain." It is less evident when we 
speak of an action as " sublime," or of a man as 
" ambitious ; " but a glance at the Latin lexicon 
shows us that these phrases are in reality every 
bit as figurative as the others. The sentence " God 
is a spirit " would seem to be, on the face of it, the 
very negation of symbolism. What could be further 
from our notion of material things than " spirit," 
and yet — 

'' The spirit doth but mean the breath." 

Archbishop Trench, in his " Synonymes of the New 
Testament," quotes approvingly Jerome's remark on 
the Apocalypse : '' There are in it as many sacra- 
ments as there are words." But why not give to 
Jerome's pithy statement a still wider application ? 
Why limit it to the last book of the Bible ? Why 
not say of " Webster's Unabridged," Quot verha^ tot 
sacramenta ? For it certainly is true of all words, with- 
out exception, that they are sacraments in the sense 
of being emblems, — representative signs of the reali- 
ties for which they stand ; the main difference between 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 143 

them and other tokens being that in the one case it is 
the eye, and in the other case the ear, that is addressed. 
"Words," says Hobbes, "are wise men's counters, 
. . . but they are the money of fools." The maxim is 
harshly phrased, but it gives us the substance of the 
whole matter in a nutshell, and abundantly justifies 
the instinct that led the early Christians, with only a 
dim consciousness perhaps of the reason why they did 
so, to call their forms of sound words " symbols ; " for 
a creed, regarded as a summary or compendium of 
" the words of eternal life," is notably a symbol of 
God's thought. 

So then, if we cared to enlarge our first definition 
so as to make it cover both the dogmatic and the 
ritual uses of the word we are studying, we might 
affirm symbolism to be the conversion of the invisible 
into terms of the visible, whether by the agency of 
objects or of sounds. 

Profoundly studied, the two sacraments ordained 
by Christ himself are seen to combine both of these 
characteristics of symbolism, — were intended, that is 
to say, to help us both by eye and ear. They are 
not dumb tokens, they are vocal ; there are words 
attached to each, and of these words the Lambeth 
platform insists that they be unfailingly employed as 
part and parcel of the actions to which they have 
been by the voice of Christ authoritatively attached. 
Both of the language of institution and of the elements 
ordained, there is to be, so the Declaration runs, " un- 
failing use." 



144 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

But while all this is true, we cannot help feeling 
that in the case of the sacraments, the material 
symbolism, as contrasted with the verbal, has the 
predominance and was meant to have it. They are 
never spoken of as doctrines, though they might very 
properly have been called that, were the lessons con- 
veyed in the respective formulas of institution the 
only thing intended to be had in mind. In fact, they 
are rather actions accompanied by words, than words 
accompanied by actions ; neither word nor action, 
however, having value of its own save as related 
to the sacred reality to which the whole symbolism 
points. 

We return, therefore, for the present to the study 
of material as distinguished from verbal symbolism, 
persuaded that here, rather than elsewhere, the clew 
to a just interpretation of the sacraments is to be 
sought. 

We must remember that whatever else and more 
than signs the sacraments may be, signs, in the first 
instance and upon the face of things, they unques- 
tionably are. No alarmist cry of " Zuinglianism ! " 
can put out of remembrance the fact that the Book 
of Common Prayer answers the question, " What 
meanest thou by this word ' KSacrament ' ? " as follows, 
" I mean an outward and visible sign." 

As to what the outward and visible sign imports 
and conveys, that is a matter for further instruc- 
tion ; but that sacraments present themselves to our 
attention first of all as signs, cannot be gainsaid. 



THE SIGNS AXD SEALS. 145 

I remark, then, that material symbols or signs may 
best be classified, and most advantageously studied, 
as (a) commemorative, (h) representative, and (/) 
effectual. A commemorative symbol is one that 
serves to keep alive the memory of a past event. 
Medals and monuments are of this order. Some- 
times there is an evident connection between the 
symbol and the fact commemorated, sometimes there 
is none. Medals usually tell their own story to the 
eye, but monuments have often to depend upon oral 
tradition to interpret them. There is nothing for 
example in the mere sight of the obelisk on Bunker 
Hill to suggest to the mind of a wholly ignorant per- 
son the fact that a battle was there fought. The 
pillar Jacob set up at Bethel, and the heap of stones 
he and Laban piled up and called Mizpah, were both 
of them commemorative symbols, the one of a vision, 
the other of a covenant. Joshua gave a like charac- 
ter to the twelve stones he caused to be laid on the 
bed of Jordan, when he said, " These stones shall be 
for a memorial." 

As civilization advances and history begins to take 
the place of tradition, commemorative "symbols, pure 
and simple, fall more or less into disuse. Medals are 
still struck and monuments built in connection with 
historical events, but nobody accounts our need of 
these things imperative, as it used to be accounted 
before the invention of printing. In cases where the 
ancients would have heaped up stones, we make a 
book and store it in a library. Still the liking for 

10 



146 THE PEACE OF THE CHUKCH. 

symbols solely commemorative is by no means extinct, 
as the countless memorial buildings and statues set 
up in our own country since the civil war abundantly 
testify. 

What I have called a '' representative " symbol is 
one that images, not a past event as the commem- 
orative symbol does, but a present though invisible 
reality. The universe is full of symbolism of this 
sort, and human speech is, as I have already pointed 
out, largely if not entirely based upon it. Represen- 
tative symbolism is, indeed, the very food and drink 
of imaginative souls ; poets cannot live without it, 
and philosophers and theologians are almost as 
closely dependent upon it as they. In fact, some 
have ventured to assert that the whole frame of 
nature, rightly apprehended, is only one vast scheme 
of representative symbolism, a delicately articulated 
and carefully enunciated Word of God to man. " With- 
out a parable spake He not unto them." We may not 
be prepared to go all lengths with Swedenborg, and to 
hold as he does that Nature is throughout, and in 
the minutest details, a counterpart and metaphor 
of things invisible ; still less may we be willing to 
accept his arbitrary and often grotesque interpreta- 
tions ; but no thoughtful student in any department 
of human knowledge can go far without discovering 
his dependence upon representative symbolism for 
the very tools with which he is to work. 

Effectual symbols (the expression has an Anglican 
sanction) are those that not only represent outwardly 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 147 

either a past event or an invisible fact, but more than 
this are actually charged with power to bring about 
results. The commission of an army officer is a good 
illustration. The commission is really given at the 
moment when the appointing power, be it king or 
governor, has decided upon its man, but the " effectual 
symbol" of the commission is the signed and sealed 
piece of parchment or paper that empowers the ap- 
pointee to act in his new capacity. 

Again, the essence of marriage undoubtedly lies in 
the mutual consent of a man and a w^oman to be hus- 
band and wife. This is what constitutes the spiritual 
fact. Xevertheless society rightly refuses to recognize 
any marriage as lawful or genuine when the " effectual 
symbol " of some ceremony, either secular or religious, 
has been omitted. The invisible fact must consent to 
let itself be expressed by a tangible sign, ring, ser- 
vice, certificate, what you please, or it passes for no 
fact at all. 

But while we distinguish between these three sorts 
of syml)ols, the commemorative, the representative, 
and the effectual, we must guard ourselves against 
supposing that the three are necessarily exclusive of 
one another. A symbol may be solely commemora- 
tive, or solely representative, or solely effectual ; but it 
is perfectly possible for any two of these character- 
istics, or, indeed, for all three of them, to be com- 
bined in a single act or object. A good instance of 
such a combination is afforded by our national flag, 
which exhibits the threefold symbolism in its com- 



148 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

pleteness. The thirteen stripes of alternate white 
and red make the flag a commemorative symbol. 
They recall the historical and unchangeable fact that 
the Colonies from which the present States have 
grown were, at the time of the formation of the 
federal government, in number thirteen. But the 
usage which provides that with the accession of 
every fresh State a new star shall be added to those 
already emblazoned on the field, makes the flag a 
representative symbol as well, for the cluster is the 
emblem of the present fact that in the unity of the 
Republic as many commonwealths have place as there 
are stars displayed. Thus the flag is seen to be at 
once historically commemorative and politically repre- 
sentative. But more even than this ; for the flag- 
becomes what we know as an effectual symbol when- 
ever it is employed for the purpose of asserting sove- 
reignty. When the stars and stripes were first hoisted 
in Alaska, the flag served as the effectual symbol of 
the transfer of that territory from Russian to Ameri- 
can jurisdiction. Can we wonder at the power of 
symbolism over the affections ? Can we wonder that 
for a flag some " would even dare to die " ? I have 
thus far intentionally drawn the most of my illus- 
trations from the field of secular life, with a view to 
making it plain that symbolism is not an affair of reli- 
gion only, but that it enters and re-enters continually 
upon the area of our daily interests and occupations. 

Confining ourselves now to " effectual " symbols, with 
a view to the concentration of our thought upon the 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 149 

sacraments, we shall do well to make note of a cer- 
tain diversity in the methods whereby the effectual 
symbols bring their effects to pass. A symbol may be 
of such a sort as to become effectual mainly through 
its didactic power as an object-lesson ; or again through 
its control over the heart, either as a pledge of reas- 
surance or as a means for the actual conveyance of 
blessing. 

That symbolic actions and objects do have a didac- 
tic or educational value, and that their effect in this 
direction is a very real effect, Christian people now- 
a-days are pretty generally agreed. It is in most 
communions simply a question of more or less, — the 
general principle is admitted. Time was when an 
open Bible, an oil lamp of antique pattern, and a few 
other emblems of the sort found in printers' sample 
books, made up all the symbolism the average Prot- 
estant would allow himself ; but now, even the icono- 
clast, so soft have manners become, refuses to lay 
about him indiscriminately and holds his hammer at 
a poise before deciding to strike. Everybody knows 
what fierce battles were fought in Reformation times 
over the sign of the cross in baptism and the use of 
the ring in marriage. We must not say too hastily 
that these contests were idle. So long as the sign of 
the cross was looked upon by multitudes of ignorant 
people as a form of exorcism, and so long as the 
ring was supposed to carry a charm with it, opposi- 
tion to these really innocent tokens was certainly not 
blameworthy, even thougli wc may judge it to have 



150 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

been excessive. Men do right to resist strictly what- 
ever they honestly believe to be the symbolism of 
falsehood. 

As respects wealth of didactic power the two sac- 
raments differ widely. The symbolism of Holy Bap- 
tism is exceedingly simple ; the symbolism of Holy 
Communion exceedingly complex. In Baptism, the 
lustral feature is the main thing. The idea meant to 
be suggested to the eye by the "water wherein the 
person is baptized " is the cleansing of the soul. Our 
Lord in his discourses uses water as the emblem of 
that which alone can quench spiritual thirst ; but 
such is clearly not the mystical or figurative value 
of this element as employed in baptism. Here its 
main purpose is to convey to the mind, through the 
agency of the sense of sight, a firm persuasion that as 
the body has been " washed with pure water " so the 
soul has in some sense, actual or hypothetical, we will 
not pause to argue which, similarly been made clean. 
" Ye were washed, ye were sanctified," writes Paul to 
his Corinthians, remonstrating with them for their 
lapse into the impurities from which the water of 
Baptism ought to have cut them off as by a Red 
Sea flood for ever. 

When Baptism is administered by immersion, there 
comes in the secondary symbolism of burial. The 
man goes down into the grave of waters in order that, 
leaving there the dead tissues of a former self, he 
presently may rise again into the pureness, freshness, 
newness of the life called holy. But for the sanction 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 151 

twice given to it in the writings of St. Paul, this in- 
terpretation of the figurative significance of Baptism 
would proba])ly strike us as far-fetched. It certainly 
cannot be said to commend itself to the mind of the 
observer as promptly as the other and more familiar 
translation of the sacramental action does. 

Studied as an effectual symbol, Baptism is found to 
have for a chief end and aim the transfer of the per- 
son washed and cleansed from one environment to 
another. At least this would appear to be the teaching 
of Anglican theology, for, in answer to a question as 
to the inward and spiritual grace or blessing conveyed 
in this sacrament, the child is instructed in the Church 
Catechism to reply, " A death unto sin and a new 
birth unto righteousness." But the only thing that 
death and birth may be said to have in common is this, 
that each marks a transition from one stage or con- 
dition of existence to another. By natural birth man 
is brought into relations with society, he becomes a 
recognized member of the human race. Similarly by 
the new birth of Baptism he is brought into relations 
with all the baptized, and from having been simply a 
member of the race becomes also a member of the 
society of Christ. So again with death ; that also as, 
Christians believe, is an event as contrasted with a 
condition ; it is not an eternal sleep, it is the gateway 
from an old and inferior sort of life to a new and 
different one. In so far then as the grace of Baptism 
can properly be spoken of as a " death," we must be 
meant to understand that by it as by a door we 



152 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH> 

pass from the worse environment to the better, from 
a state of existence clouded and clogged by " sin " 
into a state of existence made luminous and free by 
" righteousness." All this of course is uttered in the 
high and rarefied atmosphere of idealism. As a mat- 
ter of fact, we do not always discern this edifying con- 
trast between the lives of the baptized and the lives of 
the unbaptized, — would that we did ! I am speak- 
ing of the theory of the thing. Possibly if we were to 
institute a like comparison between the theory of the 
State and the practice of the State, we should find 
an even more portentous gulf sundering things as 
they are from things as they ought to be. And yet 
both State and Church, be it never forgotten, are of 
God. We must not let ourselves despair of either 
of them. Of the whole body of the baptized we cer- 
tainly may say with truthfulness, that as contrasted 
with the whole body of the unbaptized, it gives evidence 
of spiritual superiority. Armies have their poltroons 
and families their black sheep ; but we do not for 
that reason condemn the institute of family life as a 
failure, or say of the army that as an instrument of 
conquest it is useless. The like figure thereunto, even 
Baptism, doth also now save society, for by it we are 
born children into the family of God, and by it we are 
enrolled soldiers in the army of his Christ. 

I spoke of the symbolism of the second of the two 
sacraments as being more complicated, and for that 
reason more difilicult of interpretation, than the sym- 
bolism of the first. Baptism, for instance, cannot be 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 153 

said to have any commemorative character, except, 
indeed, in so far as any usage whatsoever may be said 
to commemorate the originator of it ; but in the case 
of Holy Communion the commemorative feature is, as 
we shall see, the most proriiinent ; I do not say neces- 
sarily the most important, but certainly the most pro- 
minent of all. Baptism, again, is representatively 
symbolic in only two, or at most three senses. Holy 
Communion, on the other hand, possesses a represen- 
tative symbolism so manifold that it is perhaps im- 
possible for any analysis to do it complete justice. 

I have always been impressed by the suggestiveness 
of that sentence in the Communion Office of the Book 
of Common Prayer in which we pray God that, by 
the merits and death of his Son Jesus Christ and 
through faith in his blood, we and all his whole Church 
may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits 
of his passion. " All other benefits of his passion," — 
it is as if the soul of the worshipper despaired of ever 
being able thoroughly to search into all the wealth of 
meaning and of blessing stored up in that transcend- 
ent sacrifice. Remission of sin, — yes, that is one 
thing ; but how much more, who knows ? And so also 
with the sacrament designed to put that sacrifice as 
it were before our very eyes ; is it not just what we 
ought to expect that the sign, like the thing signified, 
should be, with respect to its contents, unsearchable. 

Nevertheless, even as we may without presumption. 
or irreverence seek to look into the meaning and pur- 
port of the sacrifice itself, although assured beforehand 



154 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

that we can only know in part, so may we also with a 
certain holy fearlessness essay to interpret the sym- 
bolism prescribed by Christ himself as a help to our 
better appreciation of the sacrifice. 

I pause here to observe that the controversy with 
the Church of Rome over the number of the sacra- 
ments is, in great measure, a mere quibble of words. 
Every theological student knows perfectly well that 
other things besides Baptism and the Lord's Supper 
passed among the primitive Christians under the 
general name of sacrament. The Latin fathers seem 
to have used the word in the sense of a sacred sym- 
bol or religious emblem of any sort. The School- 
men, with their love of exact classification, gladly 
fastened the mystic number " seven " upon the sacra- 
ments, but had five or nine been needed by the 
Church authorities of their day, no doubt the meta- 
physics of Peter Lombard and Saint Thomas would 
have been equal to the emergency. Among the many 
conceivable sacraments, Anglican religion recognizes 
but two of which it is willing to say positively, first, 
that they were " ordained " by Christ Himself, and 
secondly, that they are " means of grace." 

But to come back to our study of the Holy Com- 
munion. The first and, as I have said, the most 
obvious of the aspects of the eucharistic symbolism 
is the commemorative one. The Book of Common 
Prayer, the only authoritative mouthpiece of Angli- 
can religion, insists upon this with doubled and re- 
doubled emphasis. " Why," the child is asked in the 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 155 

Catechism, " was the sacrament of the Lord's Sup- 
per ordained ? " No question could be more direct, 
and the answer is not less so. " For the continual 
remembrance of the death of Christ', and of the benefits 
which we receive thereby." In the Exhortation of the 
Communion Office we have the same point urged, for 
we are there told that " to the end that we should 
always remember " the exceeding great love of our 
Master and only Saviour, he instituted and ordained 
these holy mysteries. So then, whatever other and 
further estimates of this sacrament's significance we 
may be bound to form, it can never be right for us to 
neglect or obscure the memorial signification. Neither 
are we left in any uncertainty as to what that is which 
is commemorated. This frequently recurring act of 
reminder, this observance of which it has been pre- 
dicted that it shall endure so long as man and the 
earth maintain their present relations to one another, 
is, in the language of St. Paul, a showing forth of the 
death of Christ. Such language suggests, even if it 
does not assert, that in that death there had lain some 
marvellous significance, some singular efficacy, some- 
thing to justify the calling it, as we do when speaking 
devotionally and from the heart, a " precious " death. 
Nothing is easier than to explain away by surface 
reasoning the mystery of the great sacrifice. We may 
accustom ourselves to speak of Christ on the Cross in 
the same tone and manner in which we speak of More 
on the scaffold and Cranmer at the stake ; but after 
we have, as we fancy, emptied the whole thing of mys- 



156 THE PEACE OF THE CHUKCH. 

tery, flooded the entire field with the dry light of the 
reason, we look up and there, to our unfeigned sur- 
prise, stands the Cross still, as of old, riveting the gaze 
of the whole human family, in no slightest measure 
shaken or disturbed, but rooted to its ancient place, — 
the same easily explainable thing which yet will not 
be explained it always was. 

The truth is, the essence of the Christian religion 
lies in the principle of sacrifice. There is nothing 
on earth so deep as sacrifice, nothing in heaven so 
high. It is the secret of true life, the witness of sin- 
cerity, the root and bond of love. We are constantly 
reminded of this in our purely human relations. Sac- 
rifice whenever and wherever seen, if believed to be 
genuine, draws admiration. Look about over the 
circle of your acquaintance. Which are the lives 
that challenge your reverence, — those in which sac- 
rifice is prominent, or those from which it has been 
sedulously banished ? It is needful for man's spirit- 
ual well-being that his thoughts should be turned 
as often as possible in the direction of sacrifice. 
There is a call for some one perfect embodiment 
and illustration of the principle, and it is found in 
the person of Him who says in the hearing of us 
all, "Lo I come to do thy will, God." 

Sacrifice has never been wholly absent from reli- 
gion. We trace the history of it as a formal rite from 
the earliest times. The smoke of altars rises all along 
the line of human history. A very dim and confused 
notion of the real meaning of what they did, those 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 157 

primitive worshippers may have had, vet must this 
truth with more or less of distinctness have reached 
them, that with the giving up of life in God's ser- 
vice there is associated the winning back of a better 
life. The man who came to the altar, and left there 
as an offering to God something that had cost him 
toil and effort, and went away with a sense of par- 
don and reconciliation, was still a long way off, we 
must confess, from the point reached by him who 
could say, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;" 
but he was on the way to that point, he was being 
made ready to receive that higher truth. In the 
presence of the cross of Christ, high and lifted up, 
henceforth to be for ever recognized as the one au- 
thentic and supreme symbol of sacrifice, those old 
altar fires flicker and die. There is no longer any 
need of them ; for now the Son of God is come, and 
in place of their dim adumbrations has given us 
vision to discern that the real sacrifice is a thing 
inward and of the will, only acceptable when pat- 
terned after his own. To keep always vivid before 
the eyes of the mind, and ever printed freshly on 
the remembrance, this truth that God's best revela- 
tion of Himself to man has been effected through 
sacrifice, this is what we may call the first intention of 
the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. We 
do what we do in perpetual memory of the arche- 
typal sacrifice. Had the fortunes of that great ob- 
ject-lesson we call the Cross been entrusted to 
tradition, the thing might have Ijcen forgotten, for 



158 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

records are perishable, and manuscripts may suffer 
mutilation; but the consecrated observance, the hal- 
lowed use lives on. Not only so, but even had the 
doctrine survived, what assurance have we that it 
might not have dropped out of men's regard, lost 
its hold on their affections, been distorted, cast aside 
as obsolete, caricatured out of all likeness to itself ? 
Such a fate has befallen doctrines not a few ; it might 
have befallen this one. But somehow as sacrament 
the thing endures, outrivalling tradition in persist- 
ency, excelling dogma in many-sidedness, — a per- 
petual witness to the love of Christ, an unfailing 
memorial of the tender mercy of our God. 

An ancient name for the Lord's Supper is the 
Eucharist. The word has never fairly rooted itself 
in English speech, and does not seem to lose with 
time much of its foreign look. And yet it has a 
very simple and precious meaning; "Eucharist" is 
thanksgiving. Under what title could we better 
describe the true purport of a service from first to 
last so eloquent of gratitude. 

But Holy Communion has other aspects besides its 
memorial and eucharistic ones. It ministers to that 
need of the soul w^hich is best described under the 
similitude of hunger and thirst. Faintness and ex- 
haustion are not confined to the body. The real self, 
of which the body is but the tent or cottage, that also 
has its season of weakness and insufficiency. The 
law of nourishment binds everything that lives, be 
it plant or soul. To possess vitality means, so far 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 159 

as our human observation extends, to require food. 
One feature, and it was a significant one, of the 
ancient ritual of sacrifice was the feast upon the 
victim. On what they slew they fed. They became, 
as the phrase ran, " partakers of the altar." This 
observance also Christ lifted up and glorified when, 
in that upper room where He had gathered his dis- 
ciples to eat the Passover with Him before He suf- 
fered. He turned the paschal meal into a parable of 
the true spiritual nourishment. " Take, eat," said 
He, "this is my body." "Drink ye all of this." 
" This is my blood." When we have become familiar 
enough with Nature's processes to understand how 
it is that common food is turned to flesh and bone, 
and these mortal bodies of ours continually renewed 
and built up by nourishment, it will be time enough 
to start minute inquiries as to those more subtile 
methods by which He " in whom all spirits live " 
repairs the waste and loss to which the soul is sub- 
ject. Meantime devout and trusting hearts will con- 
tinue to take comfort, as for many generations they 
have been taking comfort, in such sentences as these : 
" I am the bread of life." " He that cometh to Me 
shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me 
shall never thirst." " I am the living bread which 
came down from heaven." " If any man eat of this 
bread he shall live for ever ; and the bread that I 
will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of 
the world." It is not necessary that we should 
thoroughly comprehend the methods of spiritual nutri- 



160 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

tion whereby such promises as these are made good ; 
it is a great happiness to believe that as a matter 
of fact they are made good, and that God does really 
feed the soul. True, we ought never to forget that 
the symbolism is representative, lest we fall into the 
error of confusing the material with the spiritual, 
so joining together things which God has put ever- 
lastingly asunder ; but neither ought we to forget that 
the symbolism is effectual as well. The symbolism 
of parental love is effectual to the conveyance of 
blessing though we know not how. It is said that 
infants who struggle up into childhood without any 
fondling and caressing, most commonly show by un- 
mistakable signs that the loss of what they ought to 
have enjoyed has told upon their constitutions. Bereft 
of all the pledges of love, the poor little things show 
like starvelings, even though they may have had as 
much material food and drink as other children. 
Disparage as vehemently as we may the value of 
outward and visible signs, here is an instance in 
which the lack of them has been well-nigh fatal to 
life itself. The truth is, there is such a thing as 
being too much on the alert against superstition. 
To believe that when the soul hungers Christ can 
feed it, that when the soul thirsts Christ can give 
it drink, — surely there is no superstition in this; 
nor do we superstitiously regard the symbolism of 
Communion when we take it to be effectual through 
the Spirit to this end. Christ is the real minister of 
the Sacrament. It is He Himself who gives Him- 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 161 

self. The earthly priest breaks perishable bread ; it 
is the heavenly Priest who says, "Eat, and thy soul 
shall live." 

The real danger-line in eucharistic symbolism ought 
to be drawn at the point w^hen a disposition to adore 
what is on the altar begins to betray itself, for here 
we do come in real peril of idolatry. With one con- 
senting voice, the true prophets of God have from the 
beginning warned man against the notion that God 
can be worshipped under the form of any dead ma- 
terial whatever. The Roman doctrine of the Mass 
evades Isaiah's invective only by the forced conclusion 
that what is on the altar after consecration is not what 
the senses assert it to be, but " the veritable body of 
our Lord and his veritable blood, together with his 
soul and divinity." ^ Once persuaded that such is, 
indeed, the fact, the worshipper may with an un- 
troubled conscience adore what is on the altar. To 
call such a one an idolater is slander. He is per- 
suaded that Christ is there upon that spot as actually 
as when his sacred feet touched the temple pavement 
in Jerusalem ; and, what is still more to the point, he 
is persuaded that nothing else is there. Why should 
he not bend all his worship towards the divine person 
so enthroned before his eyes ? 

The case is otherwise when we are invited to 
worship Christ under the "form" or "veil" of elements, 
which it is frankly acknowledged are what they look 
to be, namely God's " gifts and creatures of bread and 

1 Council of Trent, Sess. xiii., ch. 4. 
11 



162 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

wine." The appeal to the ritual worship of the 
Chosen People does not help the matter. It is true 
that the Old Testament abounds in material symbolism. 
The tabernacle and the temple were full of it. But 
of what were these material emblems symbolic? — that 
is the alhimportant point. Invariably they were sym- 
bolical of relations between persons, never of personal- 
ity itself. The ark of the covenant, the altar of incense, 
the shew-bread and the lamps of fire, — these were 
all of them material things made serviceable for the 
instruction of the devout soul ; but not one of them 
conveyed the suggestion of a Deity resident within or 
beneath the form. They were but tokens intended to 
reveal God's thought and his intention ; they were 
in no sense the environment of his person. From 
the suggestion that gold or needle-work could in any 
way become the investiture of Jehovah, the pious 
Israelite would have recoiled as if one of Astarte's 
priests had touched him. In fact, it was their stout 
refusal to allow God to be worshipped by symbol that 
gave the Israelites the lonely pre-eminence they 
enjoyed. They were not more brave in war, not 
more skilled in the arts, not better versed in philos- 
ophy, than some of the other nations their contempo- 
raries ; but in their doctrine of God they stood alone. 
The account given of the ark of the covenant, that 
sacred receptacle which in their sanctuary occupied 
the place of honor, brings out this point distinctly. 
Other religions than the Hebrew made use of arks. 
Sculptured representations of them may be seen upon 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 163 

Egyptian monuments to-day. But what held they? 
An ibis possibly, or a handful of scarabs, nothing 
better; paltry images these of that divine Majesty 
which neither the heaven nor the heaven of heavens 
can contain. But listen to what the chronicler has 
to tell us of the true ark of God. The sentence I 
have in mind occurs in that magnificent chapter, 
the finest perhaps of all the spectacular passages 
of the Old Testament, the account of the dedica- 
tion of the temple. Of this august scene the sacred 
ark, set down in what it was fondly hoped would 
prove its final resting-place, was centre. Stood there 
or lay there in it any material token, sign, or emblem 
of the adorable One ? No ; there was a symbol, but it 
was not that. The sacred thing there hidden was the 
expression not of the person, but of the will of the 
Almighty. " There was nothing in the ark," writes 
the historian with lofty simplicity, "save the two 
tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb 
when the Lord made a covenant with the children of 
Israel when they came out of the land of Egypt." 

One chief provocative of the great revolt against 
mediaeval notions of religion that passes under the 
name of the Reformation, was the desire on the part 
of the best minds to escape from such symbolism as 
was set forth by pyx and gong and monstrance, to the 
true and safe — safe, because true — position, that 
things spiritual can only spiritually be discerned. 

Two other aspects of eucharistic symbolism remain 
to be noted, namely the two that are associated with 



164 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

the name " Communion." Even when the word is 
understood only of such intercourse as we hold with 
one another, we see easily how poor and tasteless a 
thing human life would be without communion. The 
greater part of such enjoyment as we have grows out 
of the interchange of thought and feeling that goes on 
between ourselves and those about us. Cut off from 
society, man sinks to something less than man. This 
is the reason why people are sometimes found declar- 
ing that they would rather be blind than deaf ; a 
contention that looks at first sight insincere. And 
this is the reason also why, next to death, banishment 
has always been considered the capital punishment ; 
even as excommunication was ever reckoned, in days 
when the Church dealt more freely in penalties than 
she now does, the extremest form of discipline ; for 
excommunication is, after its kind, a banishment, 
being the shutting out of the offender from the com- 
munion, that is to say, the society of his fellow-believers, 
— the declaring him an exile from the commonwealth 
of God. We ought to think of Christ as coming in 
the power of the Spirit to meet us in this sacrament, 
as friend meets friend ; not, indeed, as friends who 
meet on equal terms, but in such fellowship as Lord 
and liegeman have. There are those among our 
fellow-creatures of whom we say that merely to come 
into their presence is like receiving a benediction. 
We certainly cannot think less gratefully or less 
reverentially of his approach and nearness whose 
very raiment's edge carried healing in it for the touch 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 165 

of faith. No doctrine of a real presence is so health- 
ful or so helpful as that which seeks to draw us into 
the real presence of the living Christ. If we go back 
in thought to the night when the sacrament was insti- 
tuted, and ask the disciples gathered about that board, 
wherein their chief joy lies while they look and listen, 
there cannot be any doubt as to how they will reply. 
" We are happy," they will say to us, " because He is 
near ; our comfort is in his presence, our joy comes 
from his smile, our peace is in this holy communion 
we are having with Him." This is what they would 
say to us ; and what the real presence meant to them, 
that it may best mean to us.^ We have his own war- 
rant for believing that it is the Spirit which really 
brings to us the treasure of a more abundant life. It 
is the Spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh (even were 
their fable of transubstantiation true) could profit 
nothing. 

But besides this fellowship of the soul with the 
Saviour, there lives in Holy Communion the further 

1 Compare the story of the walk to Eniniaus, as told by St. 
Luke. The obvious inference with respect to the nature of "the 
real presence " drawn from the facts of the Last Supper is some- 
times evaded by arguing that our Lord spoke in an anticipatory 
way, and indicated what the elements were destined to be after his 
decease at Jerusalem should have been accomplished. But at 
Emmaus we see Him again taking bread, blessing and breaking it, 
and giving to his disciples. When it is written that immediately 
" their eyes were opened and they knew Him," can it possibly 
mean that they "knew Him " as being in any sense resident in 
the bread 1 And this, be it carefully observed, happened after the 
resurrection. 



166 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

thought of a mutual fellowship among those who 
in one another's presence take and eat. How scan- 
tily this truth is realized, how feebly acted upon in 
everyday life, we know to our mortification. And 
yet even such a meagre embodiment of "the com- 
munion of saints " as we do have is better than 
nothing. We live by dreaming of golden times to 
come. We are for ever reaching after and hasting 
unto the vanishing horizon of our hopes. And of 
nothing is this more true than of Christ's doctrine 
of human brotherhood. It is spreading, slowly but 
surely spreading everywhere. Little by little the 
race is opening its eyes to the truth of the one 
family. Purblind visions abound ; men are seen " as 
trees walking," and all that ; but the eucharistic 
symbol of the one loaf is making itself understood, 
and onward, through dark and light, we move steadily 
to the end ordained. 

Do we seem to have wandered a long way from 
Lambeth and the Bishops ? It is an imaginary dis- 
tance. At no moment since our first departure have 
they been • beyond call ; for dissent as vehemently as 
you may from all that I have been saying about the 
significance of sacraments, take a view as much 
higher or a view as much lower as you choose, our 
very differences will but illustrate the wisdom of 
these peace-makers, the Bishops, who insist that pro- 
vided men will only use the sacraments ; reverently 
careful, in the using, not to omit the words and ele- 
ments ordained by Christ, they may, if they will, go 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 167 

on and philosophize about them to their hearts' con- 
tent. Not so much by thoroughly understanding the 
sacraments as by gladly availing ourselves of them 
are we helped. The truth is, the sacraments are in- 
stitutes not propositions. They cannot be explained 
in a hard and fast way ; the manifoldness of their 
significance forbids it. It may be possible, and at 
times necessary, to say that they are not this or that, 
but to declare in set terms all that they actually are 
is far from easy. In this respect they differ no whit 
from other great institutes of human life. We speak of 
'-'the press," of "the ballot," of "the jury system;" but 
who will undertake to put into a single affirmative 
sentence all that any one of these imports ? An insti- 
tute is like a mountain or any other great object in 
Nature, you get the effect of it in a hundred different 
ways that utterly defy classification. I cannot say 
in a sentence what Niagara does for me, nor formu- 
late in set phrase the impression made upon mind, 
heart and soul by a first look at the sea. Object- 
lessons differ in kind from language-lessons, — they 
are more intricate ; they appeal to a greater variety of 
apprehensive powers within us ; they do not address 
themselves exclusively to the logical faculty, but 
are on good terms with the imagination also, and 
take hold upon our lives, our hopes, our fears, in fact 
all that is within us. You can dissect dead systems 
of thought, you can run your knife edge between the 
two premises of a syllogism ; but a living institute 
must ])e studied in its movements and its processes, 



168 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

— ^^at the too eager touch of a scalpel the life flies, and 
the secret of which you are in search goes with it. 
Try, for example, to analyze the process by which 
that holy institute the Christian home exerts its 
influence, — it cannot be done. All are agreed that 
a good home is an outward and visible sign of an 
inward and spiritual grace, but w^ho will venture to 
declare precisely how and why it is such ? 

We have to content ourselves with saying to those 
who would break down the institute, — Destroy it not, 
for a blessing is in it. But how the blessing came 
to be there, and by what delicate processes of trans- 
mission it is conveyed, we cannot say in terms. 

In a truly Catholic Church we shall have to recon- 
cile ourselves to a very wide range of opinion with 
respect to the rationale of the sacraments. We can- 
not afford to purge out of our fellowship the great 
company of the mystics, those to whose hearts the 
eucharistic symbolism is as the very love language 
of the soul. We may not be able to think about 
Holy Communion precisely as they do, but that is 
no reason why we should not partake of it together. 
The man born without an ear for music does him- 
self no credit, when out of his own ignorance he ridi- 
cules the ecstasies of those who are living in a loftier 
world than he knows anything about. Possibly there 
may be similar differences of susceptibility in the 
region of worship, and it is at least conceivable that 
to certain natures the truth of God and the love of 
God arc brought home by sacramental symbolism 



THE SIGNS AND SEALS. 169 

with a power which, in their case at least, the sym- 
boHsm of spoken words is unable to exert. On the 
other hand, let the mystical souls be themselves 
charitable towards the non-mystical. Let them re- 
member that to the rigid enforcement of a " sacra- 
mental system," so called, the disruption of the former 
Christendom was in great measure due. It would 
be undoubtedly a hardship were poetry to be ruled 
out of life ; but we are not for that reason to forget 
that prose is what makes the common medium of 
intercourse between man and man, and that it would 
be an injustice to insist upon the exclusive use of 
the more beautiful, and, if you will, more perfect 
form of speech. 

The Bishops have therefore done wisely in setting 
the boundary pillars of sacramental usage wide apart. 
On the one hand, they make Baptism and the Lord's 
Supper an integral part of the Church's life, guard- 
ing thus against the constant drift of theology towards 
a philosophical idealism ; while, on the other hand, 
they insist that, provided the words and elements 
by Christ ordained be strictly held to, we ought not 
to let ourselves be set asunder either by differences 
of opinion as to the modus operandi of the sacra- 
ments, or by differences of taste as to the ritual ad- 
ministration of them. Idolatrous misuse is by the very 
word " sacrament " ruled out on the right, a pseudo- 
spiritual disuse is ruled out on the left, — another way 
of saying that we are to use without abusing these 
great institutes of God, siisi)icious alike of tlie old 



170 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

alchemy by which the mediaeval theologians sought 
to transmute the elements into something that they 
were not, and of the new chemistry which by a 
wholly different process would vaporize them into a 
metaphor. 



V. 

PILOTAGE. 



It is a just and equal thing that every member of society should submit 
to the laws and orders of it; for every man is supposed upon those terms 
to enter into, and to abide in it ; every man is deemed to owe such obedi- 
ence, in answer to his enjoyment of privileges, and partaking of advantages 
thereby. . . . 

The same is also a comely and amiable thing, yielding much grace, pro- 
curing great honor to the Church, highly advancing and crediting religion. 
It is a goodly sight to behold things proceeding orderly; to see every per- 
son quietly resting in his post, or moving evenly in his rank; to observe 
superiors calmly leading, inferiors gladly following, and equals lovingly 
accompanying each other. This is the Psalmist's Ecce quam bonum! 

Isaac Barrow. 

The safety and preservation of the truth requires the ministerial office. 
As the laws of England would never be preserved without lawyers and 
judges, by the common people; so the Scriptures and the faith, sacraments 
and worship, could never have been brought to us as they are without a 
stated ministry, Avhose interest, office, and work it is continually to use 
them. — Richard Baxter. 



V. 

PILOTAGE. 

Over and above chart, rudder, and compass, a ship 
requires the sort of personal supervision we call 
pilotage. The safe conveyance of the passengers is 
indeed the main point ; but to this end officers and 
a crew are needed. Hence the prominence given 
in all consultations over the well-being of the Church 
to the question, How shall the ship be manned ? We 
have already discussed the Scriptures, the Creeds, and 
the Sacraments, — possessions that correspond fairly 
well to the various helps to seamanship of which 
I just made mention ; it remains to consider pilotage, 
or, as it is more commonly named, polity. Happily 
there exists no difference of opinion as to the actual 
headship ; we all agree that Christ is in the ship ; 
and where He is, there controversy as to precedence 
dies. It is a question as to how we may most ac- 
ceptably and most efficiently co-operate with Him in 
working sails and oars ; or, to go further back, it is 
a question as to whether He made provision, before 
his visible presence was withdrawn, for the main- 
tenance of order and method in the execution of the 
task in hand. 



174 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

Whether rightly or wrongl}^ the Bishops at Lam- 
beth thought it plainly incumbent on them to put 
into what we may name their invitation an utterance 
upon this subject. The fourth and last of their pro- 
posed articles of peace reads thus : — 

" The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the 
methods of its administration to the varying needs 
of the nations and peoples called of God into the 
unity of his Church.^^ 

This opens the whole question of the Christian 
Ministry, — its origin, its transmission, its proper 
reach and scope. It is a large subject to be dealt 
with in a single lecture. I have no right to be am- 
bitious of doing more than to let fly a few winged 
words of suggestion. Mere hints sometimes prove as 
efficacious towards the actual reaching of a result 
as labored proofs ; at any rate, they are apt to be 
more kindly received by minds of the better order, 
for it is always pleasanter to be led to a conclusion 
than to be driven to one. 

It is deserving of remark as a thing not a little 
singular that so few writers on the subject of the 
ministry should have seen fit, in handling their ma- 
terial, to begin at the beginning. Some start from 
things as they are, and finding in the Christian com- 
munity of to-day a great and greatly diversified 
company of officials called variously priests, clergy- 
men, and ministers, set themselves to constructing 
some theory of the facts that shall show this to be 
the best of all possible worlds ecclesiastical. Others 



PILOTAGE. 175 

go back to that period of Church history at which the 
ministry of the particular denomination to which they 
are personally attached came into existence, and are 
impatient of any doctrine upon the subject that would 
suggest or involve the need of earlier origins. Still 
others think, with a late Bampton lecturer, that if we 
would find the fountain of trustworthy information 
under this head, what remains of the literature of 
the sub-apostolic period is our true resort ; though we 
no sooner reach this ground than we are met by 
a rival school, assuring us that we ought by no means 
to stop here, but to push on until we come within 
the actual circuit of New Testament times, and face 
to face with the apostolic men themselves. 

But even this is not to begin at the beginning. 
1 invite you to a line of search that runs back not 
only of the second century, but of the first. I sug- 
gest that we look for the initial impulse that finally 
brought to pass what we know as the Christian min- 
istry in those words of the great Householder, " I will 
send my Son." Here we have an expression of pur- 
pose that antedates Bethlehem itself. 

What I mean is that Jesus Christ is to be accounted 
the first Christian minister, not in rank only but in 
time, and that if we would understand what " the 
ministry " is in essence we must go straight to Him 
and study Him. Head of the race. He was content 
to call Himself our " minister," and laid the foun- 
dation of the " historic episcopate " by washing his 
disciples' feet. I am not at all scandalized as some 



176 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

seem to be by the strong language of the Ignatian 
Epistles with respect to the function and dignity 
of the Bishop. Even if the words should turn out 
to have been interpolated, a thing quite conceiva- 
ble, notwithstanding the triumphant shouts of most 
Anglican reviewers over Lightfoot's finished work,i 
I should still be glad to accept them on their own 
merits as testifying to a profound truth. To be sure 
it startles one, for the moment, to be told that we ought 
to think of the Bishop as representing Christ ; but 
if I were to change the phrase a little, and declare 
that no Bishop deserved the high title of "Minister" 
who misrepresented Christ, it would not seem an 
over-statement. 

The Christian ministry, — nay, I will put it more 
strongly, — the Christian religion rests on the fact 
that man is a creature who stands in continual need 
of help. So plainly unequal is he to the task of self- 
maintenance that he would long ago have perished 
from the face of the earth but for aid rendered him 
from without. I am speaking now of man in his 
physical aspect, and as he finds himself besieged by 
the forces of external nature. No animal compares 
with man as respects the length of the period of 
infancy. But even after he has been helped by 
friendly hands over this long pathway of approach 

1 Ignatian DifBcuIties and Historic Doubts. A Letter to the 
Very Reverend the Dean of Peterborough, by Robert C. Jenkins, 
M. A., Hon. Curator of the Library of Lambeth Palace. London ; 
David Nutt, 1890. 



PILOTAGE. 177 

to maturity, he would still have small chance for 
survival in the face of the tremendous odds against 
him, were it not for the assistance that comes to him 
through society. Single-handed, man would inev- 
itably have succumbed long ago ; he has kept his 
foothold by dint of co-operation, and co-operation is 
but another name for mutual help. AYhat we know 
as the Christian religion is best apprehended when 
we conceive it as a divine provision for extending 
to man in his spiritual relations a help akin to that 
which in his temporal and wholly earthly affairs he 
so evidently needs. It is pre-eminently a device for 
seeking and saving what if unsought and unsaved 
would inevitably perish. Christ comes into the world 
as the great Helper. Quietly, through unobserved 
years, He makes himself useful with his hands ; then 
He comes out into the clear light of public life and 
makes Himself useful by his words. •• I am among 
you as he that serveth," is his motto from first to last, 
whether He speaks as carpenter's son or as Messiah. 
The very word we use to describe the three years, 
more or less, of his observable life tells the whole 
story ; we name it his '• Ministry." Christ then was 
what I have called Him, the first of Christian minis- 
ters, and the key -word to the innermost significance 
of his work is helpfulness. 

We have next to note the fact that in actively 
carrying out this ministry of helpfulness, Jesus Christ 
made use not only of words but of persons. Himself 
the first of helpers, Ele must needs have those who 

12 



178 THF PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

should help Him in helping. " He appointed twelve," 
writes one of the evangelists, " that they might be 
with Him, and that He might send them forth to 
preach, and to have authority to cast out devils ; " 
" whom also," adds another, " He named Apostles." 
Here, then, is a leading fact, full of significance. 
Jesus Christ appears among men and announces Him- 
self the founder of a new social order, which He names 
the Kingdom of Heaven ; and one of his very first 
acts, as legislator, is to appoint a " ministry." He 
gathers about Himself a definite number of men, 
invests them with definite privileges, and charges 
them with definite duties. We are not to suppose 
that these twelve men were the only ones in all Judea 
who were willing to leave their farms and nets and 
shops in order to be his companions. Neither are we 
to suppose that they were the only ones among the 
multitude of believers who possessed the requisite 
qualities for missionary work. Others may have been 
as devout, others as true-hearted, others as able ; but 
He chose twelve, neither more nor less, and these 
alone He named Apostles, that is to say, messengers. 
It was not left to the chance impulse, no, not even to the 
serious inward conviction of any man, to commission 
himself a messenger: the appointment came in the 
first instance from the Head. " These are the men 
whom I accredit," He virtually said. We strike upon 
a principle here ; we see that the Christian ministry 
bore at the first the character not so much of a task 
assumed, as of a duty assigned. The Twelve did not 



PILOTAGE. 179 

say to Jesus ; " we have chosen you, and we Avill be 
your ministers ; " but Jesus said to the Twelve, " I chose 
you, and appointed you." So obvious a fact as this 
would scarcely need to be stated, save for its bearing 
upon other matters to which we shall come by and by. 
That our Lord admitted twelve men to certain priv- 
ileges, and laid upon them certain responsibilities 
which the great body of the believers did not share, 
must appear to everybody who accepts the Gospels as 
authentic, to be beyond controversy. 

But was it Christ's purpose that this ministry 
should extend beyond the term of his own presence 
on the earth, or was it to lapse with his departure ? 
Clearly the former of the two intentions was his ; 
since we find these same men, after the Resurrec- 
tion, re-commissioned by the voice that first appointed 
them to go out into the world in all directions in the 
capacity of witnesses, preachers and absolvers. It 
may be urged that it was only in their character of 
men who had personally companied with Christ, and 
could testify from memory to the fact of his Resur- 
rection, that they were thus sent forth ; and that for 
this reason they could have no successors, properly 
so-called, in the generation that followed upon their 
own. This objection certainly has weight, and docs 
avail to break in some measure the force of Avhat 
would otherwise be the unanswera1)le argument from 
the case of the election of Matthias to fill the vacant 
place of Judas ; for we are expressly told that the 
election was narrowed to a choice from amon<>: thos3 



180 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

who had been personally known to the Lord Jesus, 
and had been eye-witnesses of his risen life. But 
when we pass to the Book of Acts, and to the unques- 
tioned Epistles, and find, as we do find, an officered 
body of believers gradually coming into existence 
without break of continuity, we can scarcely refuse 
to acknowledge that, whether or not the apostolate 
was intended to last over under that name, a ministry 
that had the countenance of the Apostles, and, as we 
may say, held from them, did as a matter of fact 
emerge, and did as a matter of fact proceed to carry 
forward that very work of spiritual helpfulness which 
the Twelve were originally appointed to discharge. This 
is all I am concerned to insist upon for the present. 
We have for starting-ground, first, the fact that a 
ministry was by Christ Himself established to help 
Him in the work of helping others ; and, secondly,, 
the fact that a ministry answering to this one in all 
that was most essential, enjoyed general acceptance in 
the very first age of all, — namely, the generation 
covered by the New Testament writings themselves. 
Christianity, that is to say, set out upon its course 
equipped with a ministry as an integral part of its 
provision for the saving of the world. Man was to 
be helped in ways many and various ; but notably, as 
in the day when Christ Himself was here, by chosen 
and commissioned men. 

We have now to look, with as close a scrutiny as 
possible into the nature of this ministry of help. The 
thing has scope and reach, method and manner, and 



PILOTAGE. 181 

these, to be appreciated, must come under analysis 
both quantitative and qualitative. 

Of course that function of the ministry which at 
the first found exercise in bearing testimony from 
memory to the fact of the Resurrection, soon fell into 
abeyance. The body of men for whom it was possi- 
ble in that sense to preach the Gospel of the Eesur- 
rection, died out. There were none left who could 
say, " I saw Him, spoke with Him, was blessed by 
Him after He rose from the dead." This is not to 
affirm that the place of the Resurrection, in the order 
of Christian preaching, has ceased to be a foremost 
place. Never since the beginning has there been a 
time when the duty of preaching Christ risen and 
living was more imperative upon his ministers than 
to-day. But what I mean is that in making up our 
estimate of characteristics vital to the very idea of 
the Christian ministry, and of necessity lastingly resi- 
dent in it, this element of eye-witness is to be left out. 

How and wherein may one who has never " seen 
Christ after the flesh," make full proof of his minis- 
try, — fill out, that is to say, the circle which his 
helpfulness ought to cover ? In seeking an answer to 
this question we might, if we chose, place our main 
reliance on the evidence of tradition. What men 
have always thought about the ministry and its work, 
that it will be safe for us to think. There is a good 
deal to be said for this method. The great callings 
of human life do retain their main characteristics 
through long stretches of time, and in si)ite of the 



182 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

changes that pass upon the world. In matter of detail, 
in things accidental and incidental, there is altera- 
tion ; but not in the proper work of the calling itself. 
Battles are fought with different weapons, according 
to changed tactics, cases are tried under new codes, 
diseases are treated by novel methods ; but the soldier, 
the lawyer, the physician stand, in the main, in the 
same relation to modern society in which they stood to 
ancient. Their profiles are as distinctly outlined against 
the background of human life in general as ever they 
were. So true is this felt to be, that we are not for a 
moment surprised when we find the dramatists of two 
thousand years ago putting into the mouths of their 
soldiers, lawyers, and physicians just such character- 
istic sayings as we are accustomed to hear from the 
men who follow these same callings to-day. 

There is no reason why we should not look to find 
the like persistency of type in connection with the 
Christian ministry ; in fact, we do find it. Chaucer's 
parish priest draws our affections and holds our confi- 
dence as closely as if no great gulf of Reformation lay 
between him and us. Nay, St. Paul himself, were he 
to come back to us to-morrow, and resume his inter- 
rupted work, would find it in all essential points just 
what he left it, notwithstanding the changes that have 
come over the complexion of society meantime. 

But this appeal to tradition would hardly be in 
accord with the canon we laid down for ourselves at 
the outset, which was to keep as close as possible to 
the fount of ministerial authority, — Jesus Christ 



PILOTAGE, 183 

Himself. When He used the memorable words, '' As 
my Father hath sent Me, even so 1 send you," He gave 
us the golden key to the inner significance of every 
minister's work, and a standard by which to measure 
the completeness of it. For since we know from his 
own lips his functions as the eternal Minister to man, 
we cannot help inferring what it must mean for 
modern ministers properly to represent Him. 

The Son of God has given us to understand that 
He holds to the human race three distinct relations, 
which, taken together, make up the whole of his 
ministry. He is our Prophet, our Priest, our King. 
As Prophet, He unfolds to us the truth ; as Priest, in 
our behalf He offers sacrifice ; as King, He rules us. 
All these functions of His He exercises in the world 
spiritual ; out of the darkness comes the voice that 
teaches us : against a sky we cannot see rises the 
smoke of incense ; on supports no mortal hand has 
builded rests the throne. But these things are not 
unreal because invisible. This threefold work of 
Jesus Christ in men's behalf is as real as real can 
be, and it is for the i)urpose of making us the more 
sure of this that the ministry stands ordained. Those 
who receive it are charged as the re])resentativcs of 
Christ, his disciples, with a work closely correspond- 
ing in this feature of manifoldness with his work. 
The same law of triplicity that makes such a striking 
note of his mission is the note also of his represent- 
atives' mission. Answering to Christ's function of 
prophecy, stands the ministei-'s function of preach- 



184 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ing ; answering to his priesthood, is the minister's 
leadership of worship ; answering to his royalty, is 
the minister's responsibility for pastoral care. In 
what respect has lapse of time, the passing of many 
generations, altered or abridged this classification of 
ministerial duty ? In no respect, save only in giving 
the modern Church a deeper and richer conception of 
what the preacher ship, the priesthood, and the pastor- 
ate should be. 

Take the first of the three departments of minis- 
terial duty, instruction in things spiritual, is it not 
in its essence just what it always was ? Man has 
still to be persuaded to believe in God, still to be 
persuaded that this God in whom he believes so 
loved the world as to send into it his Son to suffer 
with and for us, still to be persuaded that fellowship 
with the Spirit of holiness is the only guarantee of 
peace of mind in this or in any world. These per- 
suasions do not come by nature : men are not born 
with these convictions rooted in their minds ; they 
have come, if come they have, through the aid of 
others, who as God's messengers have spoken to 
them, told them the truth. If these beliefs were 
really native to the soul, we should find them as- 
serting themselves everywhere, without respect to 
race or climate, or the measure of civilization. They 
would be as rife in China and Japan as in America 
and Europe. In point of fact, we know that such 
is not the case. We know that these beliefs prevail 
in lands where the Christian pulpit has been set up, 



PILOTAGE. 185 

where the voice of prophecy has made itself heard, 
not elsewhere. Moreover, they are truths of which 
the human heart and conscience have need. In that 
sense it is true that they are native to us. They are 
recognized, when once fairly seen, as being the yery 
food we require to keep our spirits from sinking 
into death. But until they have been set before us 
we do not see them ; and the setting them before us 
in such fashion that we shall know them to be what 
they are and value them for what they are worth, 
is the preacher's task. He does but take of the 
things of Christ and show them to us, prophet in 
his name. 

Some are of opinion that this work of preachership 
is coming to an end. Partly because the clergy 
have ceased to be what they were once, the only 
educated class, and partly because such wealth of 
new knowledge is pouring into man's possession 
that old faiths seem likely to be flooded and sub- 
merged, the pulpit we are assured is doomed. The 
conclusion is a rash one. As for the rise in the 
general level of intelligence, so far from being a 
discouragement to the preacher it ought to prove and 
will prove his stimulus and spur. The preacher 
differs from other teachers, in that his work is not 
merely to instruct but to persuade. The truth he 
has to convey requires a certain preparation of tlie 
heart in the receiver, — the feelings must be touched, 
the conscience wakened, the will moved, the whole 
man roused into activity ; and it is hard to see liow 



186 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

any increment of intelligence can free a community, 
any more than it frees an individual man, from the 
necessity of being brought under the personal influ- 
ence of one who has been himself persuaded, if per- 
suasion is to be made effectual. The teacher's chair 
can never take the place of the preacher's pulpit. 
How was it at the beginning? Andrew persuaded 
finds his own brother Simon, and persuades him. 
Philip persuaded finds Nathaniel, and persuades him. 
Here lies the central power in preachership ; it is 
persuasion. How then can any access of intellect- 
uality avail to make persuasion needless, or to su- 
perannuate the preacher's work ? Then as to this 
promised inflow of new and unsuspected truth, this 
enlarged knowledge of the universe and its laws, 
why should that unsettle for a moment the founda- 
tions of the pulpit ? Whatever goes to enrich the 
common treasury of wisdom enriches at the same 
time the teacher of religion. The discovery of new 
truths puts no strain upon the Creed of Christendom ; 
that Creed is not a brittle thing that it should break. 
What happens to the Creed when larger knowledge 
comes to man, is simply what happened to it in your 
mind and mine when we passed from childhood into 
maturity, — it takes on a grander meaning,^ is inter- 
preted by a more worthy standard, in a word, is better 
appreciated than before. Christianity is the religion 
of light. It has everything to hope and nothing to 
fear from more light. Time may irradiate the Creed, 
it never will annul it. 



PILOTAGE. 187 

To the prophetic or teaching office the minister as 
reflecting or representing Christ adds intercession, 
priesthood. He is the recognized leader of his peo- 
ple's worship. Here again we come upon the ques- 
tion of transitoriness or permanency. Is worship on 
the decline ? Are men ceasing to care to pray ? 
Has the altar become a meaningless symbol ? and 
will the voice of supphcation presently be hushed 
through all the world ? Some are faint hearted enough 
to think so. But philosophy and history, let alone 
theology, ought to make us ashamed of entertaining 
such a fear. Man is a worshipping creature. The 
book of his biography is full of the proofs of this. 
As well forbid the smoke to rise, as forbid the 
heart to pray. The great needs of the soul are per- 
manent, — forgiveness, quietness of mind, courage 
to bear the ills of life, comfort in bereavement, 
guidance amid the difficulties of the way, — can we 
imagine a state of civilization, no matter how far 
advanced, in which man will cease to feel a hunger- 
ing desire for these ? No student of liturgies can 
fail to be impressed by the marvellous vitality of 
certain ancient prayers. Most of them were origi- 
nally put into words by men who lived and died 
more than a thousand years ago. Within that period 
many growths have had time to spring up and to pass 
away, empires have risen, flourished, and decayed, but 
these simple forms of supplication have not become 
antiquated ; no man wearies of the Collect for Peace, 
and tlie Collect for Grace; no one desires any new 



188 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

thing in their stead. They are as fresh as they were 
when they fell from the lips of the men who made 
them. The very reason why they were treasured up, 
accepted as the family jewels of the household of God, 
was their indestructibility. Men saw that they had 
in them that which could not die, and time has 
justified the judgment. No doubt priesthood like 
prophecy must adapt itself in some measure to the 
circumstances of season and place. The temper of 
one generation may be more friendly or more hostile 
than was the temper of its predecessor to simplicity 
and plainness in the forms of worship. One race 
may take more kindly than another to ritual and 
ceremonial. But these considerations are foreign to 
the main point, which is, that the instinct of wor- 
ship, the disposition to look up, the desire to plead 
with the mysterious power that holds the keys of 
life and of death, is in us as a part of ourselves, 
not to be criticised as if it were a passing fashion, 
not to be ridiculed out of existence or bargained 
with to come to an end and cease. Priesthood, then, 
like prophecy is permanent so long as the age en- 
dures. What shall happen to them after that hid- 
den day when " cometh the end " none can tell ; but 
while the world continues, and seed-time and harvest, 
summer and winter, day and night, are what they 
are, the pulpit and the altar will hold their places. 

But what now of the third great office of the one 
Mediator, the kingship ? Is there anything answer- 
ing to that in the work of the Christian ministry ? 



PILOTAGE. 189 

At first we are disposed to cry, '' Certainly there is 
not, and cannot be. We are the citizens of a Re- 
public. There must be no ingredient of royalty in 
any ministry that attempts to minister to us." And 
yet if the main thought which has underlain all that 
I have been saying be a true thought, if the ministry 
of man to his fellow-man be indeed meant to shadow 
forth and represent the work of Christ Himself, it 
must be that there is something in this sacred office 
answering to the kingship of the Lord. You will, I 
am sure, acquit the suggestion of any taint of arrogance 
or pride when I define that answering something as 
being, what it is, the minister's pastoral duty. It is 
hard to associate absolutism, or any of the offensive 
features of royalty, with so simple, so inoffensive a 
symbol as the shepherd's crook. And yet the best 
and purest tradition of royalty after all is that which 
identifies the sceptre with the pastoral staff. The 
Homeric monarch is the shepherd of the people. 
No fault can be found with a kingship which glories 
in making itself useful. What more Christlike in 
the line of conduct has been seen in these times than 
the spectacle of the man whose style declares him 
" by the grace of God and by the will of the people. 
King of Italy," going deliberately into the city of the 
plague, determined there to remain allaying panic by 
his presence until the pestilence should be stayed. 
The sceptre of such a monarch is transfigured into 
the pastoral staff, and men see in him a fulfilment 
of the gracious words, " the good Shepherd giveth 



190 THE PEACE OF THE CHUKCH. 

his life for the sheep." Will any one care to deny 
to the minister of Christ this royal prerogative of 
service ? 

Our own times have witnessed very considerable 
modifications in the department of pastoral care, — 
in large cities especially the change has been most 
noticeable. There is about it vastly more of what 
must be called, though with no disparaging intent, 
machinery. We classify and specialize in the work 
of doing good to a degree never known before, and 
what used to be regarded as the simple task of 
caring for the flock has become so complicated a 
thing, that administrative gifts and executive ability 
liave acquired a market value, and are accounted 
almost as essential in the Christian minister as good- 
ness of heart. And yet, after all, it is goodness of 
heart that must lie behind all the activity and ani- 
mate all the mechanism, or presently we find the rat- 
tle of the wheels and shafts drowning the music of our. 
worship. As with the prophetic and the priestly sides 
of the minister's work, so with the pastoral side ; the 
pith, the heart of the thing has been the same from 
the beginning, in spite of shifting forms and chan- 
ging methods and new names. The essence of pas- 
toral duty is sympathy ; in the eye of the true 
shepherd his own flock is always his "beautiful 
flock." To care for the needy in his distress, to 
comfort the sorrowful, to cheer the desponding heart, 
to win back the wandering, to seek the lost, and to 
do this for the love of it, — such is true pastoral sue- 



PILOTAGE. 191 

cess, such the kind of service that best reflects the 
royalty of Christ. 

The question next presents itself, — and a deeply 
interesting question it is, — Did Christ intend this 
Ministry of his to abide in the world as an institute 
or as a succession ; which ? By an institute I mean 
a form or mode of life which has permanency for one 
of its main characteristics, but which is not so ab- 
solutely dependent upon a continuous existence that 
it can by no means be reproduced or reconstructed 
if once broken up. Take monarchy, than wliich 
there could not be a better illustration of my thought. 
We speak of the institute of monarcliy, meaning by 
the phrase that method of civil government which 
accords supreme authority to one person who is 
theoretically irremovable. It is of the utmost im- 
portance to the prestige of monarchy that there 
should be associated with it the legend of a long past 
during which power has been handed on from ruler 
to ruler without l)reak. Legitimacy is another thought 
that consorts easily and pleasantly Avith monarchy. 
Kings have always felt themselves strengthened, and, 
in point of fact, have been greatly reinforced by the 
prevalence of a popular belief in their divine right to 
rule. As the anointed of the Lord, a king may do 
and dare many things which subjects sceptical of 
his being such, would not tolerate. And yet mon- 
archy pure and sim])le, monarchy the institute, is 
really independent of botli of these adjuncts of an- 
tiquity and legitimacy ; it can be established where 



192 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

it has never existed, and it can be restored in lands 
where after having once flourished it was overthrown 
and put ix^Yixy. We speak of the English monarchy 
as having lasted a thousand years ; but this does not 
mean that during that long period there has been 
a continuous and unbroken line of kings and queens 
whose titles to the crown were flawless. It is the 
institute of monarchy that has endured ; the princi- 
ple of legitimacy has suffered violence more than 
once. Again, we have distinctions between different 
kinds of monarchy : there is absolute monarchy, lim- 
ited monarchy, hereditary monarchy, elective mon- 
archy ; — these are all of them varieties of the one 
institute, the only essential requirement of which is 
that the social system shall be pyramidal, with one 
man at the top. 

Very unlike what I have called the institute is 
the body known in law as the close corporation. 
Here the element of succession is paramount. A 
close corporation is made up of members empow- 
ered to fill the vacancies in their own number as they 
arise, and who are thus enabled to secure for the or- 
ganism of which they are parts, a kind of earthly 
immortality. But if, by any chance, death does be- 
fall the corporation, there is then an utter end. The 
institute, as we saw, may be revived, restored, re- 
established; but the close corporation once dead is 
dead for ever. This is the penalty it pays for resem- 
bling so nearly as it does, in assimilative and repara- 
tive power, the human body, and for enjoying a sort 



PILQTAGE. 193 

of personal identity to which the institute lays no 
claim. Under one or other of these two heads, most 
of the existing opinions about the nature of the min- 
istry may be marshalled. Men incline to think of 
the thing either as admitting of revival and recon- 
struction when occasion calls, or else as a succession 
to which the characteristic of unbroken continuity 
is all essential. Which of the two theories is right, 
and which is wrong? With some diffidence I ven- 
ture to suggest that neither view is defensible unless 
account be also taken of the other. Before hastily 
stigmatizing this line of remark as unworthy, it may 
be well to consider what there is to be said in behalf 
of each of the two sides. It will facilitate the discus- 
sion to call the one conception of the nature of the 
ministry the institutional, and the other the succes- 
sional idea. 

In favor of the institutional idea may be pleaded, 
first of all, the analogy of civil government, which is 
itself plainly an institute rather than a succession. 
The notion of a " social contract," as an historical 
event of the remote past, in virtue of which man 
came under government, has indeed been laughed 
out of court ; but that it is possible for men to band 
together, originate courts of justice, choose rulers, 
and set up a state wholly out of continuity with any 
previously existing authority, is too plain to need 
demonstration. What is known in di})lomacy as the 
recognition of a new sovereignty — an act of frequent 
occurrence — is evidence in point. But if the civil 

13 



194 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

society may, under the stress of necessity, or of what 
looks like necessity, make to itself rulers and guides 
who stand in no direct successional relation to any 
antecedent authorities, why may not the spiritual 
society do the same ? If a company of explorers, 
adventurers, if you will, have the right, in entering 
upon possession of some newly discovered and wholly 
unoccupied territory in Central Africa, to set up a 
civil order in virtue of their manhood, and of the 
social bond that necessarily exists where two or three 
are gathered together, why may they not also set up a 
holy order, and call upon it to minister the word and 
sacraments ? " Authority " is a subtle word not easy 
to define ; but whatever it may mean, it is difficult to 
see how anybody who believes both Church and State 
to have come from God can deny under the one form 
of social order what he concedes under the other ; can 
admit, that is to say, the possible origination of a king, 
while refusing to admit the possible origination of a 
priest. Not to revive the somewhat stale illustration 
of the desert island and the Bible washed ashore, let 
us suppose every minister of the Christian religion, of 
whatever name, the world over, were to be struck dead 
to-night, would not the spiritual society, in virtue of 
the powers lodged in it by the Head, be able to 
reproduce the institute of the Ministry ? Hooker, 
than whom the science of Polity owns no greater 
master, evidently was of opinion that this question 
should be answered in the affirmative. This is what 
he says : — ^ 



PILOTAGE. 195 

" Another extraordinary kind of vocation is, when the 
exigence of necessity doth constrain to leave the usual 
ways of the Church, which otherwise we would willingly 
keep ; where the Church must needs have some ordained 
and neither hath nor can have possibly a bishop to or- 
dain ; in case of such necessity, the ordinar}^ institution 
of God hath given oftentimes, and may give, place. And 
therefore we are not simply without exception to urge a 
lineal descent of power from the Apostles by continued 
succession of bishops in every effectual ordination." ^ 

Again, there is the very powerful argument deriva- 
ble from observation of results. If a piece of steel is 
shown me, I do not deny it to be steel merely because 
I happen to know that it was made by the Bessemer 
process. That process was for some time looked at 
suspiciously as an innovation ; but it held its ground, 
and secured establishment and recognition, and for 
the sufficient reason that the steel made in accordance 
with its formula was found to be good steel. It is not 
to be wondered at that men should reason after a like 
fashion with respect to the ministry and the products 
of the ministry. The proper product of the minis- 
try is character. Bishops, priests, and deacons exist 
primarily in order that souls may through their 
instrumentality be rounded into symmetry, — made 
what God meant them to be. Any ecclesiastical phi- 
losophizing that tends to blur this great central fact 
of all, is self-condemned. Tlio Church is God's device 

1 Eccles. PoHty, Book VII. xiv. [11]. 



196 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

for bringing spiritual fruit to perfection. If ever the 
under-gardeners forget this, and from fear of " the 
wild boar out of the wood " turn all their attention 
to keeping the hedges in repair, the purpose of the 
Householder is thwarted. 

When, therefore, we see, as we cannot help seeing 
unless our eyes are wilfully and persistently shut, 
that unique product known as Christian character 
abundantly developed under a ministry of the word 
and sacraments that does not claim for itself succes- 
sional validity, we are moved to cry. What does it 
matter whether Holy Orders have the sort of legiti- 
macy conferred by unbroken continuity of transmis- 
sion or not? — here is the thing itself to produce which 
Holy Orders were originally designed ; let us reason 
back from the fruit to the tree, from the cluster to the 
vine ; if the thing borne is good, it must be that the 
stock from which it sprang is healthy. Moreover, this 
position appears to be strongly buttressed by a most 
suggestive precedent in Christ's own ministry. I 
mean, of course, the case of the man whom even the 
beloved Apostle desired to see formally condemned, 
because, while following not with the Twelve, he yet 
ventured upon casting out devils in the holy Name. 
The parallelism here would seem to be perfect ; and 
is, in fact, so singularly striking, that for those who 
believe the Gospels to have been written for our learn- 
ing, it must be hard not to see in it an intended lesson 
for us of these denominational days. The man was 
in the strictest sense of the word a volunteer. He 



PILOTAGE. 197 

had received no commission, not even the most in- 
formal one. But he had, so to say, all alone by him- 
self, fallen in love with Jesus Christ ; and finding 
himself, like Stephen, full of faith and of the Holy 
Ghost, had assumed to exercise that primary function 
of the ministry of help, — the driving out of those 
evil tenants that bar the gate of the soul against God's 
entrance. 

Very possibly some of the Apostles, with the story 
of Dathan and Abiram fresh in mind, had looked to 
see the earth open and swallow him up ; failing this, 
the least they could expect was that his mouth should 
be officially shut, and his exorcisms declared invalid. 
But no, nothing of the sort ensued ; Christ was con- 
tent simply to utter that weighty sentence, which 
ought to be named the golden rule of ecclesiastical 
polity, — "Forbid him not, for there is no man which 
shall do a miracle in my name that can lightly speak 
evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our 
part." It is true that we have in another connec- 
tion the contrasted saying, " He that is not for me 
is against me ; " but there is no real conflict of pur- 
port in the two dicta. In declaring that whoever 
is not for Him is against Him, Christ speaks in the 
singular number, and what He has in mind is the 
necessity of whole-hcartedncss in religion. Personal 
loyalty, He is reminding us, admits of no compro- 
mises. "No man can serve two masters" is his other 
way of putting the same thought. But in his com- 
ment on the doings of the self-appointed minister 



198 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

whom the duly authorized Apostles desired to see put 
out of countenance, our Lord uses not the singular 
but the plural. The word is not '' me " but " us," 
and for the simple reason that in this case the ques- 
tion of personal allegiance is not raised at all. It is 
not so much as alleged that the man is casting out 
devils boastfully in his own name ; he is confessedly 
doing it in Christ's name. But if so he must be 
personally on Christ's side, and wholly on Christ's 
side. He would be powerless to cast out devils if he 
were not. The only trouble with him is that he has 
failed to discern, and to identify himself with, the 
true " stream of tendency." And yet, in spite of this, 
what he does is not thrown away ; the little tribu- 
tary rills that flow with but slight momentum into 
the river as it moves strongly on, may not seem to 
add very much either to the volume or to the swift- 
ness of the current ; but in so far as they are " not 
against" it, they may fairly enough be said to be 
" for " it. The river could flow without any partic- 
ular one of them; but they all help. Not to any 
voluntary association for the promotion of Christian- 
ity does the promise run that the gates of hell shall 
not prevail against it, and yet there is nothing to 
forbid that the rivers of the flood thereof should 
make glad the city of God. Surely this is a better 
way of estimating modern denominationalism in its 
relation to Christendom as a whole, than to go rum- 
maging about among the early centuries, bent on dis- 
covering the particular heresies and sects to which 



PILOTAGE. 199 

present-da}^ forms of Christianity may with most of 
likehhood be compared. 

And this gives me an easy point of transition to 
the other side of the argument, for the argument, as 
I began by insisting, has its two sides. Although 
Christ was full of charity for the volunteer exorcist, 
and flatly refused either to censure or to silence him, 
He showed by the very language He employed that 
He considered the advantage to lie with the main 
body, — with those who were serving under a system 
of orderly appointment. What other meaning can we 
attach to those phrases, " with us," " on our side " ? 
Who are included in these plurals ? Clearly and 
beyond all question the Apostles themselves. There 
is a side ; God's battle has begun ; and the Leader 
says to his staff, Don't quarrel with anybody whom 
you find fighting in my name, even if he be nothing 
more than a skirmisher ; he is on our side. 

Let us look then at some of the strong points of 
the successional idea. The great advantage of strict 
notions with respect to the orderly handing on of 
authority is that they make for the interest of rever- 
ence and tranquillity. Gi-ant that there may be times 
when it is needful to shock reverence and to break 
up tranquillity, concede in other words the abstract 
"right of revohition" for cause ; nevertheless, It will 
hardly be disputed that ahke in State and Church 
reverence and tranquillity are desirable possessions 
where they may be had. Hence even democracies 
are careful not to dispense wholly with the visible 



200 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

and audible welding process whereby the incoming 
administration is fastened to the outgoing one. No 
appearance of absolute fracture is permitted ; the gov- 
ernment is, as we sa}^, handed on. This conserves 
reverence for authority, and helps the maintenance 
of quietness ; for legitimacy takes sanction from the 
past, and even Republics grow stronger after they 
have had time to age. The mere fact of our know- 
ing that not a civil government on earth can boast 
of having held its authority in unbroken continuity 
from time immemorial, does not nullify this sort of 
reverence in us. True, we say to ourselves, there is 
but one river of authority that flows on endlessly; all 
power is of God ; but it is well to approximate as 
nearly as we can to the stately movement of that 
eternal stream. We will not needlessly and wantonly 
break with the past. Hence we have in ecclesiastical 
history the noteworthy fact, that spiritual commu- 
nities to whom what I have called the successional 
idea is bitterly repugnant because they cannot with- 
out torturing the record reconcile it with their actual 
beginnings, are often markedly tenacious of whatever 
prestige may have come to the body denominational 
by dint of long survival and continuance. They feel 
that a slur is cast upon their ministry if it be ranked 
with that of a sect born yesterday. But if there be 
nothing at all in the successional idea, if the whole 
notion of transmitted holy orders be delusive, anti- 
democratic, and unspiritual, why should there be, 
under the supposed circumstances, any such pride 



PILOTAGE. 201 

of place, any disposition to look patronizingly on the 
latest born in the denominational family ? Ought it 
not rather, in its role of infant Church, to be wel- 
comed and to have everything made pleasant for it ? 
It would appear, therefore, that even those who repu- 
diate in terms the successional principle, do tacitly 
attach a certain amount of importance to it. They 
are unwilling to base their ministry upon that idea ; 
but neither do they object to seeing that idea become 
historically associated with their ministry. Other 
things being equal, they hold it desirable that author- 
ity should be transmitted in an orderly and peaceable 
manner, although if it were necessary to fight for the 
institutional as against the successional conception of 
the nature of the ministry, fight they would. 

Broadly speaking, we may say that one of these 
two ways of looking at the thing is characteristic of 
the Catholic ; the other, of the Protestant mind. All 
Romanists, most Anglicans, many Presbyterians, 
make much of the successional aspect of the minis- 
try. With more or less of insistence they demand of 
any one who proposes to exercise what are commonly 
known as sacred functions, his ecclesiastical creden- 
tials. By what authority doest thou these things? 
they ask ; And who gave thee this authority ? In 
the other Christian communities the full proof of a 
man's ministry is looked for in the present rather 
than in the past. Can he and does he, as a matter of 
fact, convert souls from sin to righteousness? If he 
can and does, then let there be no minute investiga- 



202 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

tion into pedigree, or captious search for title ; but let 
the work authenticate the worker. 

In the face of such divergencies as these, it would 
seem as if any attempt at reconciliation must bear 
failure written upon its face. The case looks still 
more hopeless when we remind ourselves that these 
contrasted estimates of the nature of the ministry 
have their roots deep down in that subsoil of human 
nature, which the ploughshare of logic does not so 
much as touch. The causes that make some men 
Nominalists and others Realists in philosophy, the 
causes that have made your neighbor a conservative 
and you a radical in politics, or vice versa, are resident 
in a region back of consciousness. 

" Out of darkness come the hands 
That reach through Nature, moulding man.'* 

If therefore anybody imagines that it is in the power 
of council, conference, or synod to put forth an utter- 
ance potent to convert all the adherents of the institu 
tional view to the successional idea, or all the adherents 
of the successional view to the institutional idea, I can 
simply answer that, for myself, I am under no such hal- 
lucination. I have no faith in any possible emulsion 
of oil and water ; and while I admire the industry, I 
have small respect for the judgment of those sanguine 
mathematicians, who in their devotion to impossible 
tasks emulate Sisyphus and his rolling stone. I am 
contented to believe that parallel lines continued to 
infinity can never meet, transcendentalists to the con- 



PILOTAGE. 203 

traiy notwithstanding. And yet ideas that cannot be 
theoretically reconciled admit sometimes of practical 
adjustment. The solvitiir amhulando principle applies 
to other problems than that of motion. The differ- 
ences of opinion that divide men upon the subject of 
Church polity are really no wider than those that 
sunder them in the region of political philosophy. 
Engage a group of statesmen in a discussion of the 
principles of international law, provoke a club of 
political economists into a debate over the definition 
of wealth, propound at a social science congress the 
question of the true nature of punishment, and straight- 
way almost as many judgments will emerge as there 
are brains working. Nevertheless, the nations for the 
most part live together in peace ; wealth, whatever 
may be the true theory of it, is quietly amassed and 
securely held ; and prison discipline is maintained. 
It is true, as I have already admitted, that behind our 
unity in these civil and social matters there lies the 
hidden arm of force, ready at any moment, as repre- 
senting the convictions of the greater number, to pound 
us into unity if we attempt anything subversive of 
the established order. Yet, surely. Christians ought, 
sooner or later, to learn under the compulsion of love 
the lessons which citizens have to be taught by the 
compulsion of force. 

At any rate the men of the Lambeth Conference of 
1888 were sanguine enough to account such an im- 
proved state of things at least imaginal)lc, even if not 
imminent or probable. Their utterance upon the sub- 



204 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ject of the ministry has been, as was naturally to be ex- 
pected, more sharply criticised than any other portion 
of their platform. Some have seen in it an offensive 
assertion of prerogative ; others have interpreted it 
as an invitation to all men to tm^n Anglican without 
delay ; still others have been moved to ask, Who are 
these Bishops that they should venture thus to speak 
before they have been spoken to ? And yet these 
ministers of Christ in conference assembled could 
scarcely have used more carefully guarded language, 
supposing them to have felt it their duty to say any- 
thing at all upon the subject. All they did was to 
suggest a modus vivendi. Carefully avoiding the well- 
known phrase "Apostolical Succession," which would 
have committed them hopelessly to a particular phi- 
losophy of the ministry, and made the winning of those 
who hold to the institutional idea impossible, they 
fastened on certain words, the characteristic of which 
is, that they express a fact without at all insisting 
upon any theory of the fact. " The Historic Episco- 
pate," they said, " locally adapted in the methods of 
its administration to the varying needs of the nations 
and peoples called of God into the unity of his 
Church." That government by oversight, which is 
what " episcopacy " when translated means, has been 
historically the prevailing method of polity in Chris- 
tendom, certainly from the second century onwards, is 
beyond dispute. That associated with this episcopacy 
there has been a constant endeavor (whether success- 
ful or no, I am not now arguing) to maintain orderly 



PILOTAGE. 205 

succession, nobody denies. To ^vliat then does the 
Bishops' suggestion amount except to this, that if vre 
are to have organic unity at all, it is more reasonable 
to expect that it should be brought about under this 
method of pilotage than under any other. There would 
seem to be nothing either unreasonable or arrogant 
in this. It is a simple falling back on fact. Think 
as you please, the Bishops seem to say, about the 
nature and the sanction of the Christian ministry. 
All we have to urge is that if a harmonious and self- 
consistent method of administering the word and the 
sacraments is the thing sought, the voice of human 
experience uttering itself through history suggests 
that a system of oversight safe-guarded by careful- 
ness in the transmission of authority is the more 
excellent way. Had the Bishops said, " Take our 
word for it, there has been no break anywhere in 
our dynasty;" had they said, "Be ye sure of this, that 
unless you company with us there is no grace in you," 
they would, indeed, as seekers after reconciliation, have 
made themselves a gazing-stock. But these are the 
things, be it observed, which they did not say. 

If it be urged that there is a little interval of cloudi- 
ness between the Xew Testament days, when we see 
Christ appointing Apostles and St. Paul appointing 
deputies, and those not much later days, when by the 
acknowledgment of all historians the system of over- 
sight is found everywhere esta])lished throughout 
Christendom, the answer is, that however fatal this 
circumstance may be to alleged demonstrations of 



206 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

" apostolical succession," it does not lay so much as 
a feather's weight of opprobrium upon the argument 
for " the historic episcopate." As is well known, the 
authentic Christian literature of the times immedi- 
ately subsequent to the Apostolic age, is not abundant. 
The Church grew noiselessly. 

" The towers of IHum hke a mist arose." 

The city of God came not with observation, and the 
builders were more careful to do their work than to 
leave records of the process. If, however, as soon as 
we come to the place where hints and vestiges begin 
to abound, we again find the method of appointment 
and commission as evidently the prevalent one, as we 
saw it to be in the days on the other side of the cloud, 
certainly the presumption, to use no stronger word, is 
in favor of the belief that what was historical before, 
and has been historical since, was also historical dur- 
ing that interval period upon which doubt has, in post- 
Reformation times, been cast. And yet a presump- 
tion, strong as it may be, cannot be made the basis of 
a proof ; and the Bishops did that for which posterity 
will thank them, when they took the Historic Episco- 
pate rather than the Apostolical Succession for the 
key-note of their appeal. 



VI. 

A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 



Politics are from God; not only allowing and approving governments, 
but commanding them, for the better manifestation of his own glory, and 
men's greater good, temporal and spiritual. Hence it is evident that 
POLITICS, both CIVIL and ecclesiastical, belong unto theology, and 
are but a branch of the same. — George Lavvson. 

Yes, by willing angels; by the Holy Ghost; by the inspired Word; by 
indestructible sacraments; by many instruments and intermediates; but 
chiefest of all by his own direct power in men both good and bad, in one 
inspiring and in the other resti'aining, — He triumphantly defends the 
Church and turns all her defeats into victories ; putting her out among the 
instabilities of the world and the whirl of its mutations as one thing that 
cannot be shaken; overthrowing nations, but preserving her; rolling a tide 
here, in which empires, races, tongues, philosophies, arts, landmarks, codes, 
thrones, and every conceivable grandeur and fancied immortality are 
made to sink and disappear like foundered ships, while on this same tide, 
and over its peopled sepulchres, He causes this one indestructible to ride. 

N. J. Burton. 



VI. 

A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 

In commending to English-speaking Christendom 
a particular form of governance and ministry as most 
agreeable to past precedent taken in the large, the 
Bishops at Lambeth were careful to speak guardedly. 
Had they supplemented their mention of the Historic 
Episcopate with nothing more gracious than Pilate's 
peremptory " What I have written I have written," 
the utterance which they intended as an invitation 
would certainly have been construed as a demand. 
As men appreciative of contemporary fact, while not 
irreverent towards old tradition, they chose other- 
wise. Cheerfully tolerant of those lines of national 
diversity which they knew it to have been the con- 
stant endeavor of the papal policy to wipe out, they 
phrased their thought about governmental unity as 
follows : " The Historic EpiHcopate^ locally adapted in 
the methods of its administration to the varying needs 
of the nations and peoples called of God into the Uyiity 
of his Church.''^ 

Nothing could be more evident than the intention 
here to distinguish between what is permanent and 
what is variable in connection with the episcopal 

14 



210 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

regimen. We have already studied the essentials of 
episcopacy, as such, and found them to be reducible 
under the two heads of Christlikeness as respects the 
exercise of a threefold function, and continuity, pre- 
sumable even if not demonstrable, as respects the 
tenure and transfer of authority. These central char- 
acteristics admit of no subtraction, they are of the 
essence of the thing; but whatever is more than 
these may count for surplusage. 

Few Americans, for instance, a hundred years ago, 
had any more adequate notion of a bishop's attributes 
than was conveyed by the engraved portraits of emi- 
nent, prelates of the Georgian period that, here or 
there adorned the walls of some colonial governor or 
Church-of-England townsman. The full-bottomed 
wig and ample display of lawn that made the body 
of the picture, together with the mitre and pastoral 
staff skilfully worked in as marginal features of the 
plate, were most impressive in their way ; but the 
savor was distinctly a savor of the things seen and 
temporal. This disposition to look askance at epis- 
copacy as being presumably first cousin to royalty, 
was, of course, strongest in the States that had been 
originally founded in the anti-prelatical interest ; but 
no doubt it was well-pronounced all along the coast. 

It must be confessed that the solicitude of the 
new democracy was not unnatural. Those were 
Erastian days ; and the very mention of episcopacy 
carried with it thoughts of lions, unicorns, kings, 
lords, and commons. As well might an ardent non- 



A CHtJRCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 211 

juror of Sussex or Kent have tried to persuade the 
village squire at a parish dinner to make two separ- 
ate toasts of Throne and Altar, as White or Seabury 
have labored to convince the Americans of their day, 
that episcopacy was not in some sense an appanage 
of the British Crown. How strongly this was felt by 
White himself is evident throughout his pamphlet. 
'^ The Case of the Upiscopal Churches in the United 
States Considered^ In the Preface to this brochure 
he writes: "A prejudice has prevailed with many that 
the Episcopal Churches cannot otherwise exist than 
under the dominion of Great Britain. A Church 
Government that would contain the constituent prin- 
ciples would remove that anxiety which at present 
hangs over the Church of England, and yet be inde- 
pendent of foreign jurisdiction and influence on the 
minds of many sincere persons." The very fact that 
it had been found necessary to expurgate tlie Prayer- 
book in order to banish the Royal Family from the 
thoughts of the worshipping congregation, was of it- 
self pr/??za facie evidence that episcopacy ought to 
be reckoned as part and parcel of the old order of 
things now put away for ever. Moreover, were tliere 
not here and there in parishes, all the way from 
Portsmouth to Savannah, glebes, parsonages. Queen 
Anne Bibles and communion plate, and other visible 
possessions, the legal title to which had, since the 
surrender at Yorktown, rested solely upon the un- 
derstanding that the body clahning them as its prop- 
erty was historically and actually the successor and 



212 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

legatee of the organization before known as The 
Church of England in the Colonies ? And yet, in 
spite of all the prejudices, convictions, and associa- 
tions thus engendered, no intelligent American to- 
day considers that there is any necessary connection 
between a bishop, a full-bottomed wig, and a seat in 
the House of Lords. We have learned something, 
and are learning more. We perceive that the dis- 
tinction between the transient and the permanent, so 
valuable in our studies of all things else, has value 
also in the criticism of episcopacy. It is evident that 
the acceptance by a people of this particular polity 
does not necessarily involve a reception of all the 
concomitants that in the mind of another people 
may have been wrapped up with it. 

An interesting question now presents itself. In the 
case of the nation to which we ourselves by birth or 
by adoption belong, what are the special '- needs " to 
which, in the " methods of its administration " the 
Historic Episcopate might fairly be expected to 
"adapt" itself? Here is this American people "called 
of God into the unity of his Church," how shall the 
Historic Episcopate mould itself into harmony with 
the race instincts it here encounters ? 

There is, of course, a base and unworthy sense in 
which this notion of adaptation may be entertained ; 
with that we have nothing to do. Any modification 
of polity that should involve the lowering by a hair's 
breadth of the standard of holiness whether for priests 
or people would be fatal. There are American char- 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 213 

acteristics to which the Historic Episcopate could 
never adapt itself without playing traitor to the 
Bishop of bishops, the Shepherd of all souls. 

But what are the great structural principles of 
social life to which this nation, as a nation, stands 
committed ? What maxims with respect to govern- 
ance and polity and organization have become such 
current coin among us as to seem axiomatic ? Ac- 
curately to distinguish these Americana will be to 
take a long step towards understanding what, in our 
own case at least, the Lambeth language means. 

Prominent among the better characteristics of our 
national mind stands reverence for what is constitu- 
tional, as contrasted with Avhat is arbitrary, in the 
exercise of power. This trait 'came to us with our 
English blood, having been perhaps intensified by a 
century of life under a written constitution. Not 
that there is any special efficacy in written consti- 
tutions which unwritten ones may not and do not 
share ; only it will scarcely be denied that the em- 
bodiment of great constitutional principles in actual 
terms, known and read of all men, does tend to con- 
centrate, and by concentrating to intensify, a people's 
reverence for its organic law. The document be- 
comes the visible symbol of that peculiar combination 
of thoughts and feelings which gives a nation its 
personal identity, and is cherished accordingly. The 
Count de Maistre, a profound thinker on this sub- 
ject, in his dislike for whatever he suspects of hav- 
ing been extemporized, goes the length of denying 



214 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

that there was or ever can be any such thing as a 
written constitution in the true sense of the word.^ 
Had he lived to see the centenary of the Consti- 
tution of the United States, he might possibly have 
modified the harshness of his utterances upon this 
point. He was fond of buttressing his statements 
with citations from Holy Scripture, and, had he 
looked, he might have found a precedent for written 
constitutions as far back as the days of the Judges. 
" Then Samuel," the record runs, " told the people the 
manner of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book, and 
laid it up before the Lord." And yet, no doubt, the 
material out of which Samuel made his book was con- 
stitutional material; there was precedent, more or less 
abundant, for the " manner of the kingdom ; " and De 
Maistre must be allowed to be right, at least so far 
as this, that when wise men write constitutions they 
never do it off-hand and de novo, but only seek to put 
into words things already found by experience to be 
true. 

The great value of a constitution, whether writ- 
ten or only traditional, lies in its efficacy as a barrier 
against despotism. This is what it means for a mon- 
archy to be "limited ;" tile thing that limits is the con- 
stitution, which imposes on the kingdom its "manner" 
or fixed form, to wit, the boundary lines that may not 
be overstepped. We are accustomed to speak of the 
United States as being that phenomenal thing, a na- 

^ Essai sur le Principe Geiierateur cles Constitutions Politiqiies, 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 215 

tion " born in a day," and we pride ourselves on being- 
able to name the day ; but this is questionable talk. 
The blossom of the century plant, when at last it 
bursts, has all the suddenness of a miracle ; but only 
the patient absorption of much now forgotten sunshine 
has made the flowering possible. The Constitution 
of the United States was not created instantaneously 
out of nothing. Genius had much to do with it, but 
Divine Providence had more. Its very first para- 
graph presupposes a knowledge of antecedent facts. 
The Pentecost rather than the Fourth of July is the 
day that ought to be honored as the real birth-day of 
what we now know as civil liberty. It was then, to 
speak accurately, that Christendom began to be. For 
is it not clear that only by such a general diffusion of 
right-mindedness as Christ's religion has brought to 
pass, can government of a people by laws of its own 
making, and rulers of its own choosing, be possible ? 
Just in proportion as God pours out His spirit on all 
flesh, can all flesh be trusted to walk alone. The 
old attempts at free government perished, " having 
not the Spirit." Even Samuel's limited monarchy 
came to naught. But for a world baptized with the 
Holy Ghost, better things are possible. Government 
of the many by the few is necessary when the many 
are in the dark, and only the few have light ; but when 
the many get the light, then government by the few 
becomes an anachronism, the hour for self-government 
has struck. The de-Christianized race or nation loses 
this self-governing faculty ; and that is the very peril 



216 THE PEACE OF THE CHUECH. 

which is confronting us to-day. The human body, as 
St. Paul so clearly discerned, is the only adequate 
emblem or parable of the perfect social state, and 
the human body, as we know, is governed in all its 
motions by a pervasive indwelling spirit. The power 
that opens or shuts the hand is a power transmitted 
along threads of communication which are hidden, and 
it asserts itself from within. When the crutch and 
the splint are brought into use, it is instantly per- 
ceived by observers that something has gone wrong. 
Hurt of one sort or another must have befallen the 
man, we say, or these outward assistances would not 
have been needed. The healthy body has all the es- 
sential mechanism of motion within itself. This is 
the image of the thoroughly Christianized community, 
every member of which speaks and acts as he is 
moved to do by the spirit of God uttering itself in 
and through the conscience. That we are far enough 
from this ideal condition, I need not waste breath in 
showing, but that this is the only working hypothesis 
upon which a democracy can hope to enjoy perma- 
nence is a point which Christian teachers ought to 
emphasize more strenuously than they do. 

Now the constitution of the Church — 1 mean the en- 
tire Church, "Holy Church throughout all the world" 
— is an unwritten body of practical maxims which have 
accumulated under the teaching of the Spirit. There 
is, as we know, electricity in action, and again there 
is electricity stored, put away in reserve for use when 
needed ; there is light in action, and again there is 



A CHURCH BY LOYE ESTABLISHED. 217 

light garnered and laid up in the veins of coal. So 
with the spirit of wisdom,, for the Spirit of God is 
the spirit of wisdom, — this also admits of accumula- 
tion ; this also may be put away in store, secreted. 
Thus the constitution of any given State — and the 
same can be said of the constitution of any national 
Church — is simply so much accumulated wisdom as it 
may have been given to that State or to that Church 
to discern and to embody. The constitution is to the 
government, whether civil or ecclesiastical, precisely 
what the balance-wheel is to the watch ; it secures 
the administration of affairs upon settled principles, 
rather than by freak or whim or passing impulse. If 
America and England deserve to be called the freest 
countries of the earth, it is because they, more con- 
sistently and more thoroughly than any of their sister 
nations, have carried out and embodied this concep- 
tion of what government ought to be. This Anglo- 
American ideal stands forth the most clearly when we 
contrast it with absolutism on the one hand, and with 
out-and-out democracy on the other. Under absolu- 
tism, the ruler is supposed to hold a deposit of power 
directly intrusted to him by the Almighty, and what 
he says is law ; under democracy pure and simple, 
the voice of the people is alleged to be the only au- 
thentic voice of God, and though it shout one thing 
to-day and the contradictory of it to-morrow, it must 
be accepted as God's voice all the same. But under 
a free government, properly so-called, the voice of the 
people is accepted as the trustworthy index of the 



218 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

divine mind only in so far as it may be found upon 
examination to be in harmony with the great sum 
total of accumulated wisdom into possession of which 
the children of men have, through the experience of 
many generations, been gradually brought. This la- 
boriously earned increment of wisdom is what makes 
a constitution. Doubtless, that is the supremely-fav- 
ored society in which " the common sense of most " 
avails to hold in check the inevitable irrationality and 
waywardness of some ; only in defining and determin- 
ing our " most," we must be very careful not to be 
misled by merely temporary majorities ascertained by 
cast of ballot, count of heads, or ehow of hands, but 
to look rather to that great multitude of the wise and 
good of all times, times present and times past, whose 
judgment on the points at issue stands recorded. 

In view of the profound attachment entertained 
for these principles by the American people, it is 
plain that no episcopate how historical soever will 
be likely to commend itself to them as having been 
locally adapted in the methods of its administration 
to their own particular need, unless it be a constitu- 
tional episcopate. 

This is the secret of the deep distrust entertained 
by many, of the unitive schemes urged by the lov- 
able and saintly Muhlenberg and his associates, in 
the so-called " Memorial Movement " of forty years 
ago. The plan was for the Bishops of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church to go forward on their own re- 
sponsibility, and quite independently of any powers 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 219 

conferred on them in terms at their consecration, 
to ordain ministers of the Gospel who should serve 
wholly on the outside of Anglican lines. But it 
was felt, and I venture to think rightly felt, by the 
greater number, that however desirable it might be 
for the Episcopal Church to come into closer com- 
munication with those beyond its pale, it could not 
be right for any Bishop who had taken upon his lips 

the words, "In the name of God, Amen, I, N , 

do promise conformity and obedience to the doctrine, 
discipline, and worship of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church in the United States of America," — that it 
could not be right, I say, for any Bishop, so pledged 
and sworn, to perform acts of which neither the Con- 
stitution nor the Ordinal of the Church whose Bishop 
he was, made any mention. To the working of a 
constitutional episcopate it is essential that Bishops 
speak and act constitutionally. 

We shall return by and by to this question of 
the connection between constitutional methods and 
eirenic plans ; but, meanwhile, I note a second gov- 
ernmental principle as one to which the American 
mind is indissolubly wedded, namely, legislation by 
representation in contrast with legislation by edict. 
As the constitutional principle is the guarantee that 
power, whether legislative, judicial, or executive, shall 
not be arbitrarily employed regardless of the com- 
mon understanding, either tacitly maintained or else 
registered in some jrrcat charter, so the representa- 
tive principle is our guarantee that the current laws 



220 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

of the land shall be the expression of the people's will 
and bear the stamp of their assent. Here, as before, 
the Christian relio-ion enters in as the controUins: 
factor in the problem. How is it conceivable that 
any people can safely be entrusted with the making 
of its own laws, except it be a people in whose heart 
are God's ways ? Just as really, therefore, may it 
be said of representative as of constitutional govern- 
ment, that without a doctrine of the Spirit it is futile. 
At any rate, whatever may be thought of the applica- 
tion of this doctrine to the State, there ought to be 
no doubt of our duty to recognize its workings in the 
Church. Certainly to the body of believers, if not to 
the Commonwealth, the Pentecostal promise runs that 
the law from having been an imposition from with- 
out shall become an utterance from within. It is this 
reversal of the point of view that really makes the 
difference between the two Testaments, and it was 
upon this issue that Moses, man of God, went out of 
the world's premiership, and Jesus, Son of God, came 
in. This is the democracy of the Magnificat, and the 
only democracy that can stand. To this idea of law- 
making by fairly elected representatives, the Anglo- 
American mind is knitted by tendons that bleed if 
you cut them, and no episcopate that should seek to 
waive or to nullify this feature of our social life could 
for a moment allege with any show of reason that 
it had been locally adapted in the methods of its ad- 
ministration to the needs of the people of the United 
States. 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 221 

And here I bid you note the encouraging fact, that 
with respect to the desirability of law-making by repre- 
sentation, American Christendom, with the exception 
of the Roman Catholic portion of it, is already prac- 
tically at one. Churches organized on the principle 
of independency cannot of course permit the exercise 
of legislative power by any body larger than the local 
congregation ; though even these have their councils 
and conferences, membership of which is conferred by 
the representative method. But when it comes to the 
case of those denominations that aim at organizing 
themselves on national lines, it is safe to say that 
the difference of principle involved in their respective 
methods of legislation is so slight as to be inappre- 
ciable. Save for a few catch-words of no importance 
worth the mentioning, a man with his eyes shut would 
scarcely know whether he was in the Presbyterian 
General Assembly, the Methodist General Conference, 
or the Episcopal General Convention. What does it 
matter whether a measure pending in a deliberative 
body be called a " canon " or an " overture " ? It is 
substantially the same thing in both cases, namely, 
an attempt to give shape to what is believed to be 
the popular will, by the representative method. It is 
true that in one of the bodies I just mentioned, — the 
Episcopal General Convention, — the law-making has 
to be done by what is known as the concurrent action 
of two houses, eacli of which has a power of veto 
upon the decisions of the other ; but this, instead of 
making it the less American, only makes it the more 



222 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

so; for legislation by single chamber has never found 
favor in this country, but, on the contrary, our civil 
laws, both State and Federal, have to run the gaunt- 
let of two sets of critics before they can be engrossed. 
For ecclesiastical purposes either "council" or "synod" 
is a far better word than " convention," which to the 
American sense smacks of a political flavor ; and it is 
pleasant to think how entirely at home in the popular 
branch of the national synod or council of " The 
United Church of the United States " we should all 
find ourselves. 

A third American characteristic is fondness for a 
strong executive, when this may be had without any 
sacrifice of the guarantees of constitutional and legisla- 
tive freedom. Our people almost worship efficiency. 
They like the man who in times of dimness and diffi- 
culty can say, I take the responsibility. In this re- 
gard episcopacy needs no adaptation ; it is adapted 
already, and it is this very characteristic that to-day 
is commending it to the American mind. Fatherhood 
and leadership make the very essence of episcopacy, 
and in the task of prosecuting spiritual conquests, 
winning a people for God, fatherhood and leadership 
are what are needed most. The father's love and wis- 
dom, the leader's clear-sightedness and dash, — what 
missionary qualifications are there that compare with 
these ? In fact, is it not true that every denomination 
of Christians has already, in one shape or another, an 
episcopate of its own ? Is there one among them all 
that does not look with more or less of deference to 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 223 

its leading spmts, its controlling minds ? So true is 
this, that the late Dean of Westminster with char- 
acteristic ingenuity proposed that the argument for 
episcopacy should be shifted from sacerdotal grounds 
altogether, and made to rest on the well-established 
sociological fact that power of leadership is the in- 
heritance of only a certain percentage of human kind. 

With St. Paul to back me in my choice of words, 
I cannot think that 1 shall seem to you to be lower- 
ing the subject, if, while dwelling upon this phase of 
it, I call attention to the way in which efficiency is 
secured in handicrafts. In the familiar titles " fore- 
man," "journeyman" and "apprentice," do we not see 
reflected Dishop, Priest, and Deacon ? And is it not 
true that such a partitioning of functions, such a 
distribution of effort, lies bedded in the very nature 
of things, quite apart from all question of apostolical 
precedent and canonical usage ? Contractor, carpen- 
ter, helper, — can you build your house without these ? 
Yes, perhaps, after a fashion ; but in house-building 
on a large scale it is wise to allow for the employ- 
ment of all these. It is a homely illustration, I 
grant you, of the truth that a three-fold cord is not 
quickly broken, but then we must remember that the 
highest verities and the humblest often lie close to- 
gether. The parables of our Lord are in the same 
condemnation, if condemnation it be. 

The Hegelian philosophy of the Trinity finds strength 
in the fact that it makes appeal to the familiar data of 
consciousness, and it may be that my work-a-day argu- 



224 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ment for Bishops, Priests, and Deacons may not prove 
the less persuasive for having been based upon the 
experience of common life. Efficiency is intrinsically 
a homely theme, and must needs draw its illustra- 
tions from the prosaic side of life ; but then we have 
to remember that Martha's place in the one house- 
hold of God is as real and as necessary as Mary's. 
The ministers of Christ are servers always, and of 
servers it is required that they be found efficient. 

Another principle very precious to the Anglo- 
American mind is that of the maintenance of or- 
ganic unity by what is known as the federal method, 
— the combination, that is to say, of the two ideas of 
sovereignty and of what has been happily called " sub- 
sovereignty ; " the sovereignty being resident in the 
Union, and the sub-sovereignty in the States. Here 
again we shall discover that episcopacy suffers no vio- 
lence by adaptation, but, on the contrary, lends itself 
with cheerful readiness to meet what is required of it. 
For, when we think of it, every rightly-ordered com- 
munity is a union of householders, each of which has 
its head. Just as the molecule is the unit of crystalline 
structure and the cell the unit of vegetable structure, so 
is the family the unit of social structure. The aggre- 
gate may be larger or smaller, so small perhaps as to 
be called a tribe, so large as to be called a nation ; but, 
whether tribe or nation, when analyzed it is found to 
be made up of families, each one of which, while con- 
ceding sovereignty to the aggregate, retains meanwhile 
a sub-sovereignty proper to itself, each father being 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 225 

the head of his own household. In ecclesiastical 
sociology, what would seem to answer best to this 
relation between the family and the aggregate of 
families ? Most evidently a like relation between 
the group that clusters itself about one spiritual 
leader who answers to the father, and the aggregate 
of such groups. If now for leader or father, we read 
bishop ; and for aggregate, read national Church, 
have we not the very thing that corresponds per- 
fectly with the American conception of organic unity 
through federalism ? 

I should like to pause here and dwell upon the 
highly suggestive and sympathetic bearing of all 
this on the ecclesiastical system known as Con- 
gregationalism, or, in its still more elementary form, 
as Independency. The great truth embedded in Inde- 
pendency, and it cannot be too strongly emphasized, 
is the sacredness of the ecclesiastical unit, and the 
insistence that this unit shall be maintained by a 
personal bond, an actual tie knitting the teacher to 
the taught. Independency insists that without the 
molecule there can be no crystal, without the cell no 
body ; and if in its zeal in this direction it has suf- 
fered the crystal and the body themselves to fall out 
of mind and be forgotten, we ought not for that reason 
to be indifferent to the value of the lesson which the 
story of Congregationalism in America, and especially 
in New England, teaches. The Massachusetts and 
Connecticut parish of early eighteenth-century days, 
conterminous as it was with the township, and so 

15 



226 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

ordered that the whole population, men, women, and 
children, came under the spiritual headship and guid- 
ance of one pastor, was probably the best illustration 
of the ideal of what I have called the ecclesiastical 
unit, that Christianity in this country has ever seen. 
Assuredly no bishop of Anglican lineage has ever, on 
this side of the ocean, exercised a territorial episco- 
pate (understanding the word for the moment in its 
simple sense of spiritual oversight) that could com- 
pare for general acceptance with the unchallenged 
rule of an Edwards or a Davenport. That Congre- 
gationalism even on its own chosen ground should 
have failed to maintain its standing order, is a fact 
for which those who account the system an imperfect 
and one-sided one, have of course their own explana- 
tion. Upon this phase of the subject it would be un- 
gracious to dwell ; my main purpose in referring to 
Independency at all having been my wish to bear 
testimony to the unspeakable value of the principle 
by which it has ever set such store ; namely, the truth 
that the rudimentary unit of the visible body of Christ 
is the group of souls clustered about one personal 
centre, himself father or shepherd according as we 
account his group to be " family " or " flock." 

Whatever bright prospects may be beckoning for- 
ward the Episcopal Church in the United States, of one 
thing we may be sure, that if this primeval truth concer- 
ning the unit is forgotten, there is nothing but disaster 
in store. No aggrandizement of the diocese can possi- 
bly make up for the loss of the personal tie that ought 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED, 227 

to link a shepherd of souls to every separate soul in 
the flock over which the Holy Ghost may have made 
him overseer. Should God grant this unity move- 
ment success upon a large scale, the number of souls 
to be cared for would be so great that bishoprics 
would shrink to very modest territorial limits indeed 
In that event Counties might become Dioceses, and 
States Provinces, — a reversion in one respect to the 
well-known purpose of the organizers of the American 
Episcopal Church, who were ever solicitous to observe 
State lines. Under such an arrangement, the organi- 
zation of the Church would answer to the organization 
of the Country almost as face to face, the aggregates 
of the ecclesiastical units corresponding to the aggre- 
gates of civil units perfectly. 

But what of the difficulty at the other end of the 
line ? When it comes to the matter of aggregating 
our ecclesiastical units, where, some one may very 
naturally ask, are we to stop? What logical land- 
ing-place is there short of the seven hills where Leo 
sits ? Why should the Christian Church, spiritual 
corporation that it is, take any notice of civil bound- 
ary lines, which, as we know, are here to-day and 
there to-morrow ? Would it not be better to accept 
the principle of oecumenicity as the Roman Church 
presents it to us, and consent to merge all our 
units in the one great Latin union which is so ready 
to receive and to absorb them ? This raises a point 
so interesting that we cannot but wish to consider 
it, so crucial that we have no right to shun it. The 



228 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

philosophy of national churches, the whole question of 
their genesis and their right to be, is a matter that 
greatly needs clearing up. As everybody knows, they 
are the hete noire of Rome. It was the national char- 
acter of the English Church that made it what, before 
these Tractarian days, good Anglicans delighted to 
call it, " the bulwark of the Reformation." To fight 
a nation up in arms for what it believed to be its spiri- 
tual liberties was found even by a world-monarch no 
laughing matter. 

But why, if we admit the desirability of any ag- 
gregation of local churches, is not Rome right in 
the contention ? Why is not her inviting catholi- 
city a better and truer thing than our eagerly 
sought, and as yet confessedly not found national- 
ity ? National Churches, I answer, find their sanction 
and warrant in these words of Jesus Christ, " My 
kingdom is not of this world ; if my kingdom were of 
this world, then would my servants fight." Rome 
has misconceived this sentence as seriously as ever 
Pilate did. Its true import is to this effect, that 
since Christ's kingdom is a spiritual organism it 
cannot push itself by material methods, but, so far 
as localization and delimitation are concerned, must 
conform itself to such boundary lines as the civil 
power for its own purposes may have drawn. The 
State is the great force-organization, the Church is 
the great love-organization, and the moment the love- 
organization begins to say, " I insist that the territory 
shall be divided thus and so," that moment it usurps 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 229 

the functions of the force-organization, discredits its 
own title of " kingdom of heaven," and lapses into 
worldliness. The papal theologians are fond of see- 
ing in the two swords the disciples in the Garden of 
Gethsemane offered Christ, a symbol of the combined 
temporal and spiritual authorities ; but it is more nat- 
ural to infer from our Lord's words, " It is enough,'* 
that his purpose was to disavow swords altogether. 
" What have I to do with weapons such as these ? " 
He seems to say ; and his healing of the hurt of Mal- 
chus on the spot points to the same conclusion. For 
that kind of work. He would have them understand. 
He was not responsible ; his servants had misunder- 
stood Him. How they have gone on misunderstand- 
ing Him through all the so-called Christian ages, we 
know only too well. The true answer, therefore, to 
Rome's demand that there shall be a world-wide 
visible Church is this, — Your motive is good, but 
your endeavor is premature. (Ecumenicity is of itself a 
most desirable thing ; but you are in too great a hurry 
to catholicize the world. The love-organization can- 
not hope to be visibly unified over the whole globe, 
until the force-organization shall first so have unified 
itself. Hear what St. Paul saith, " That is not first 
which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and after- 
ward that which is spiritual." This is as true of the 
ecclesiastical as it is of the human organism. Our 
aggregate of units can be no larger than civil govern 
ment will let it be. We Christians desire to see the 
aggregates become as large as may be, and we should 



230 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

hail with joy that advent of the " parliament of man " 
which would make oecumenicity possible ; but, for the 
present, the national church is the largest union at- 
tainable, and with this we must rest content. There 
being no united world there can be no united church 
of that dimension ; but no such moral impossibility 
forbids our hope of a United Church of the United 
States, for the course of this nation has happily been 
peaceably ordered by God's governance, that it ought 
to be possible here for his Church to serve Him " in 
all godly quietness," which is but another name for 
unity. This is our answer to Rome, and it is a suf- 
ficient answer. 

We come back to the point from which we started, 
namely, the feasibility of unifying American Chris- 
tianity by the method known as consolidation. In 
the light of all that has been said, what practical 
measures would seem to be possible ? One resort is 
ever open to us, and perhaps, in the immediate pres- 
ent, only one, " Men ought always to pray." Nor do 
we need, for that matter, to frame any new or un- 
tried supplication ; " Thy kingdom come," covers it 
all. But how may we best follow up our prayer ? We 
are American Christians, with certain grave respon- 
sibilities resting on us in virtue of our being Ameri- 
cans rather than Latins or Orientals ; what may we do 
to make possible that concerted action on the part of 
God's people in this land, the lack of which entails 
such scandal ? This much, at least, to start with, — 
We may recognize the fact that the material for the 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 231 

United Church of the United States is ready to our 
hand in the persons of all those who by whatever 
hand have been baptized into the Name of the Father, 
the Son, and the Holy Ghost. These constitute that 
Church in posse which we would see become the 
Church in esse. These make the citizenship of the 
Kingdom. But how may the existing organizations 
help the movement on ? Here are these ten or twelve 
great churches ; what can they severally do to bring 
to pass the one still greater Church ? I cannot without 
presumption venture upon offering counsel to any 
save that single one of the too numerous group to 
which I am personally attached. To her, as her 
loyal minister, I have a perfect right to speak, so 
that I do it modestly and out of an honest heart, no 
matter how little the thing said may deserve to 
engage her thought. 

My belief is that the Episcopal Church may best help 
forward the movement we have been studying, by a 
gradual and tentative moulding of her present Con- 
stitution into a closer conformity with the principles 
formally enunciated at Lambeth. This statement of 
essentials, although never given the force of statute 
law by binding enactment, has, nevertheless, met 
with such complete acquiescence on the part of the 
clergy and people of the Anglican Communion through- 
out the world, that it may almost be said to have 
been adopted by general consent. What now would 
it mean to conform the written Constitution of the 
American Episcopal Church to the principles of the 



232 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

Lambeth platform ? This one thing it would mean if 
no more ; the doing so would be the best possible 
evidence of our sincerity and good faith in putting 
forward the proposal in question. Some may think 
that to let this consideration sway us would be a com- 
promise of our self-respect, — a sort of acknowledg- 
ment that others had had a right to suspect us of 
shamming. But if our chief solicitude in this mat- 
ter be to preserve our dignity intact, we shall ac- 
complish little. The question is, Have not others a 
perfect right to expect that, after having said we 
would unite with them on certain terms, we should go 
on and provide some method of making the accept- 
ance of the terms a practicable thing ? There is no 
such method, nor can there be, unless by way of 
constitutional enactment. Again I throw out the 
caution. Let us shun the rock on which the Memorial 
Movement split. Let all things be done in order. 
Since the year 1789 the Constitution of the American 
Episcopal Church has been amended fourteen times. 
No proposal still further to amend it can therefore prop- 
erly be stigmatized as presumptuous or unprecedented. 
One great improvement, entirely in the line of the 
Lambeth proposals, would be to place at the very 
beginning of the instrument the confession of our 
faith.^ Surely the constitution of a Church is the 
natural place to look when one is seeking to find out 

^ The Council of Trent set a good example in this respect, if 
in no other. In the forefront of its dogmatic utterances it places 
the Nicene Creed. 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 233 

what such Church considers fundamental to her very 
being. But what do we find greeting us at the thresh- 
old of the Constitution of the American Episcopal 
Church ? We find certain provisions regulating the time 
and place for the meeting of the General Convention, 
and specifying what shall be done in case of the break- 
ing out of an epidemic disease in the town or city pre- 
viously designated for such meeting. This is lament- 
ably, and but for the seriousness of the subject, I should 
say, ludicrously inadequate. Doubtless, what prevented 
the framers of the Constitution from putting anything 
doctrinal into the first article of that instrument was 
the sense of a certain ill-defined duty of allegiance to 
the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. 
They failed to perceive, and considering the novelty 
of the situation we cannot wonder at it, — that, in 
drawing up a written constitution for a new national 
Church, they were doing a thing that ought to work 
the supersession of the Thirty-nine Articles altogether.^ 
They were undertaking to do for the Church what the 
members of the Constitutional Convention, about the 

^ So long ago as 1782, Bishop, then Doctor, White wrote as 
follows with respect to the status of the Thirty-nine Articles : 
" For the doctrinal part, it would perhaps be sufficient to demand 
of all admitted to the ministry, or engaged in ecclesiastical legis- 
lation, the questions contained in the Book of Ordination, which 
extends no further than an acknowledgment of the Scriptures as a 
rule of faith and life ; yet some general sanction may he given to 
the Thirty-nine Articles, so as to adopt their leading sense, which 
is here proposed rather as a chain of union, than for exacting 
entire uniformity of sentiment." (The Case of the Episcopal 
Churches in the United States considered, p. 13). 



234 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

same time, did for the State, — namely, to put in writ- 
ing the organic law. Their duty with respect to the 
Thirty-nine Articles, then as now a part of the 
organic law of the Church of England, was to incor- 
porate into the new Constitution of the Church so 
much of their substance as they held to be essential, 
and to let the rest drop. Instead of doing this, they 
allowed the question of the true status of the Articles 
to drag along in an indeterminate way until the year 
1801, when at last a formal recognition was accorded 
them. But it must be confessed that ever since their 
transfer from English to American soil, the Thirty- 
nine Articles have had a provisional and transitory 
look. One of them has a title with nothing after it. 
To another a saving clause has been added, to warn 
readers of the Second Book of Homilies against cer- 
tain references therein contained to the constitution 
and laws of England. Surely it can never have been 
imagined that of such sort would be the permanent 
dogmatic constitution of a great Church. Why not 
look facts in the face ? The Thirty -nine Articles were 
originally drawn up by the English Church as a defence 
against the Rome of the sixteenth century. Rome 
having, deliberately changed her base in the year of 
our Lord 1870, does not our elaborate battery look, to 
the critical eye of present-day strategists, a little out of 
range ? Would not the embodiment in the first Article 
of our Constitution of what the Bishops at Lambeth laid 
down with respect to the Scriptures and the Creeds, 
completely meet our needs ? In fact, upon any liy- 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 235 

pothesis of consolidation, are we not in honor and 
in duty bound, if we propose to stand by what these 
Bishops said, to make this very adaptation ? It may be 
that the time will come when the Thirty-nine Articles, 
bound up with the Westminster Confession (not thrown 
aside, but laid aside), will be given a place of honorary 
retirement among the theological archives of the Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples. To disown these old confessions 
would be for the great communions with whose history 
they are respectively associated an act of deep ingrati- 
tude ; to disuse them might be an act of discriminating 
wisdom. 

One other, and only one other, constitutional 
point needs mentioning, and that is the matter of 
worship. Probably no single feature of the unity 
movement has occasioned more disquietude to con- 
servative minds in the Episcopal Church than the 
absence from the Lambeth platform of any saving- 
clause with respect to a prescribed form of worship. 
Except as respects the actual words of institution in 
the case of the two sacraments, the silence of the plat- 
form upon the subject of devotional formularies is com- 
plete. But does this mean that the favorers of unity 
upon the Lambeth lines desire to alter by so much as 
a letter the Book of Common Prayer, or to abridge in 
the slightest degree the privileges of those to whom 
the aroma of its devotions is as the breath of life ? 
Certainly not. Perhaps no greater calamity could 
befall either English or American religion than would 
be involved in the disappearance of that particular 



236 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

type of Christian character which a loyal and faithful 
use of the Book of Common Prayer engenders. The 
really desirable thing is, not the destruction, but the 
conservation of any and all types that are good. But 
what is to hinder that within the pale of a consoli- 
dated Church various methods of worship should be 
in use side by side — at least, until by general consent, 
and in virtue of the law of the survival of the fittest, 
one or another of them had come to be recognized as 
the more excellent way ? A practical method of con- 
stitutionally carrying out this inclusive policy would be 
the one already suggested, namely, that of classifying 
local churches under such titles as Congregations of 
the Anglican Rite, worshipping in accordance with the 
Book of Common Prayer ; Congregations of the Ger- 
man Kite, worshipping in accordance with what are at 
present known as Lutheran forms ; and Congregations 
of the Puritan rite, worshipping without any liturgy 
at all, except in so far as the sacramental words of 
institution may be said of themselves to make a lit- 
urgy. This would not be absolute uniformity, I grant ; 
but is anybody expecting absolute uniformity ? Is any- 
body desiring it ? To reduce the competing houses of 
worship in our country villages even to three, would 
be a distinct gain ; and with constitutional provision 
made for '' high ritual," "low ritual" and "no ritual," 
such a reduction ought, in a United Church of the 
United States, to become possible. In that event no 
Episcopalian need lose what is most precious to him ; 
nor any Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or Methodist 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 237 

suffer forfeiture of those precious associations that in 
his mind are indissolubly linked to what he accounts 
the simpler method of approaching the throne of God. 
Meanwhile, the whole village would be the stronger for 
knowing that one communion held both the Anglican 
and the Covenanter in its embrace, — nothing having 
been lost, much having been gained. 

It will be said that the country is not prepared for 
this. Nothing could be truer. The question is, — 
Could we be better employed than in furthering the 
needed preparation ? That a desired consummation 
is a hundred years away, ought not to discourage 
brave men from breaking ground and beginning the 
approach ; and at any rate 

" It never yet did hurt 
To lay down Ukehhoods and forms of hope." 

Of course, if one is persuaded that nothing in the 
present state of things needs mending, his strength is 
to sit still. But it is difficult to understand how such 
a longing for a more perfect union, as evidently is in 
the minds of many, should have arisen without cause. 
So woe-begone and pitiful to some of us does the pres- 
ent broken, nay splintered, condition of contemporary 
Christendom appear, that, as believers in the divine 
origin of our religion, we cannot but seem to ourselves 
to be shut up to one or other of two conclusions, — 
either that Almighty God is bent on bringing to pass, 
through all this disintegration, a better and truer unity 
.than has ever been before ; or else that what we see 



238 THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH 

going on before our eyes is the slow merging of the 
ecclesiastical in the civil order, — the coming in of the 
so-called " gospel of the secular life," the practical 
obliteration of the Church, as of an institution that 
has fulfilled its mission for the sanctifying of society. 
For this latter alternative, in the face of a whole 
world ying in wickedness, we are not prepared ; there- 
fore, we take the former. This drives us into build- 
ing-projects whether we will or no ; hence, if we vex 
you by our importunity, try to think of us as of men 
upon whom a necessity is laid ; if we seem the vic- 
tims of " a craze," try to remember that so Paul 
looked to Festus, and Simon Peter to those who on 
the day of Pentecost thought him " full of new wine." 

To those of his Anglo-Catholic friends who with 
indecent haste are for burying the Lambeth Platform 
out of sight as a dead failure, because it has not 
brought Christendom into unity within the space of 
four years, the writer would commend one of George 
Herbert's Jaeula Frudentum, " Evening words are not 
like to morning." 

But, if build we must, only one point has to be de- 
cided. On what lines and according to what dimen- 
sions ought our edification to proceed ? 

There are two perspective drawings of the Church 
of Christ often hung up for us to look at and admire, 
but neither of which, I venture to insist, deserves our 
unqualified approval. One is a dreamy, Turneresque 
representation of a building, large enough to be sure, 
and lofty enough, but so completely wrapped about 



A CHURCH BY LOVE ESTABLISHED. 239 

with wreaths of mist, that we are left very much in the 
dark as to what the structure is ; we cannot tell where 
it begins or where it ends. The thought of the archi- 
tect is hopelessly concealed by the water-colorist's 
too generous fog; the whole thing is a suggestion, 
nothing more. The other picture represents a tidy 
little building, snug and compact, jauntily balanced 
upon a narrow ledge of rock. There is no mystery 
about it at all. We see the whole thing at a glance. 
It evidently will not accommodate many people ; but 
then, nobody can deny that the outline is fault- 
less, the symbolism correct, and the masonry beyond 
reproach. There is no mist in the air, there are no 
clouds in the sky ; the whole thing is distinct, well- 
defined, pretty to look at, small. 

The one picture is from the hand of the liberalist, 
the other from the hand of the sectarian, — Anglican, 
sectarian, or another, it matters not. The former of 
them gives us largeness without definiteness ; its com- 
panion, definiteness without size. 

In our endeavors at unifying the national religion 
and helping forward the People's Church, it will be 
wise of us to take neither of these architectural 
attempts for our accepted model, but rather to aim at 
such lines of structure as shall impress themselves on 
all observers as being alike generous and clean-cut. 

THE END. 



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